Swedish gaming authority has fined Kindred, ATG, and PinBet £1.4m, €1.7m, and $1.8m, respectively, for loopholes in their Anti Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML and CTF) measures.
All sanctions were imposed after the Swedish Gaming Authority Spelinspektionen criticized operators’ weak AML and CTF measures. The three operators were fined totaling SEK18.9m, with Kindred subsidiary Spooniker receiving the highest fine of SEK10.9m.
Spelinspektionen picks customers who are active with the three operators within a specific period. The regulator chose 12 customers from Kindred, 13 clients from ATG, and 12 customers from PinBet, who were then analyzed.
There were many failures detected across the board. In one scenario, a customer who played with Spooniker deposited SEK80.8m from 1 Jan 2019 to 2 Feb 2022 over 813 occasions. When the taxable earnings of that customer were analyzed in May 2020, they were SEK3.9m for 2018.
Spelinspektionen noted that in the full ruling, “The customer’s gambling then regularly generated alarms in the system, but when the customer was found to be winning the game, no action was taken.”
The customer had to provide data about funds on many occasions. At that time, the customer was classified again from medium to high risk as the funds’ origin couldn’t be identified. After a due diligence analysis disclosed about the customer’s company and a SEK135m inheritance, the risk was again reduced to a medium level.
For ATG, The regulator noted that many customers investigated “have made deposits amounting to large amounts without the origin of the funds being checked until long after the deposits were made.”
Spelinspektionen claimed that “ATG has only collected information on taxable income for three of the customers – customers 4, 5, and 8. In the case of customer 4, however, information on the taxable income was collected only after the Gambling Inspectorate began supervision.”
For PinBet, Spelinspektionen stated that the operator’s warning system only flagged 7 of the investigated customers indicating that those must be looked into as at-risk. Along with other concerns, every customer gave a warning of high deposits between seven months and a year before PinBet actually took action.
“According to the SGA [Spelinspektionen], Kindred has failed in its enhanced due diligence requirements and has not taken sufficient measures to assess the risk of its services being used for money laundering and terrorist financing. Kindred fully shares the SGA’s ambition to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. Anti-money laundering is a priority in Kindred’s compliance and sustainability framework. Kindred would welcome increased clarity from the SGA and the legislation on what objective and effective AML risk parameters should be to consider when assessing a customer’s risk profile,” read the statement.
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