betfred fined 900k for NOT stopping someone losing 18 grand in a day. so which is it then

BillThornes

BillThornes

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right so this has been nagging at me since it came out end of last month and im posting it because i genuinely don't know what i think anymore. as you might heard commission announced petfre gibraltar paying £900,000 over social responsibility failures. the headline bit: a customer got flagged after going over a deposit trigger, staff looked at it, decided nothing further needed doing. that same customer then deposited and lost another £17,900 over the next 24 hours. nobody stepped in.

also came out that when an account got flagged for a safer gambling review betfred wouldn't actually do the review for another seven days. now. ive spent two years on this forum going on about how the affordability checks are nanny state nonsense and how they treat grown adults like children. i still think a lot of that. but im reading about a bloke losing eighteen grand in a day with a system that had already flagged him and did nothing, and i cant square it.

so which is it. cracking on whether we want them looking or don't...
 
seven days mate. seven. that's not a system thats a filing cabinet
 
The two positions aren't actually in conflict, which is what makes this uncomfortable.

Affordability checks operate on deposit thresholds. You cross an arbitrary line, you supply documents, regardless of whether your behaviour indicates any problem at all. That catches recreational players who are fine.

What the Commission fined Betfred over is different. Their own systems flagged genuine behavioural indicators - spend, time on site, patterns of play - and then nothing happened for a week. That isn't surveillance of ordinary customers. It's a failure to act on their own alarms.

You can consistently believe the threshold approach is bad policy and that a firm ignoring its own risk flags for seven days is a serious failure. Different arguments about different things.
 
bill_collins said:
The two positions aren't actually in conflict, which is what makes this uncomfortable.

Affordability checks operate on deposit thresholds. You cross an arbitrary line, you supply documents, regardless of whether your behaviour indicates any problem at all. That catches recreational players who are fine.

What the Commission fined Betfred over is different. Their own systems flagged genuine behavioural indicators - spend, time on site, patterns of play - and then nothing happened for a week. That isn't surveillance of ordinary customers. It's a failure to act on their own alarms.

You can consistently believe the threshold approach is bad policy and that a firm ignoring its own risk flags for seven days is a serious failure. Different arguments about different things.
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yeah ok thats actually helpful. one is checking everyone who crosses a number, other is ignoring the people your own system is screaming about.
still feels like the same instinct behind both tho. build a system, dont resource it, tick the box
 
exactly what it is and both things serve the same purpose from operators side which is documentary cover. thay built the flagging system because the licence conditions require them to have one, they didn't resource the response side because responding costs money and having the system is what gets inspected. the affordability checks are the same logic pointed at us instead of at them, you hand over the documents so the file is complete, nobody at the other end is reading them, the file existing is the whole point. and now we've got a settlement that proves the file was empty the entire time and the answer will be a biger file, more data collected, same nobody reading it, and every one of us slightly more documented than we were last year
 
as someone whose bf has had a couple of bad stretches can say the bit that got me wasn't bout seven days. it was that a person looked at that account, saw whatever they saw, and decided no further action necessary. then eighteen grand went in the next day. somebody made that call. someone sat there and decided it was fine
 
I've had those interactions. you get the popup or the email, are you enjoying yourself, is everything ok, want to set a limit. you click yes im fine because thats obviously what you click. box ticked, account note updated, and you carry on doing exactly what you were doing.
interaction isn't for you. never was. its so theres a record of them asking.
 
900k tho. betfred group did £1.46b turnover in their last accounts, and that's the 78 week period so its not a clean annual number, but the online arm on its own was £563.6m of that. entain paid 17m in 2022 and wh nearly 20m the year after. this is a rounding error to them tho lets be honest
 
fair on the numbers but worth adding context. betfred pulled out of nine us states and sold their spanish business, and they've been openly warning about remote gaming duty going from 21 to 40 %. they said publicly the whole retail estate was on the line, thats 1,300 odd shops.
not defending them. but "rounding error" assumes a business thats comfortable and they've spent the last year saying they're not.
 
colinsunderland said:
fair on the numbers but worth adding context. betfred pulled out of nine us states and sold their spanish business, and they've been openly warning about remote gaming duty going from 21 to 40 %. they said publicly the whole retail estate was on the line, thats 1,300 odd shops.
not defending them. but "rounding error" assumes a business thats comfortable and they've spent the last year saying they're not.
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yeah alright thats fair enough tho.still not much of a deterrent is it
 
technically it's not a fine at all it's a payment in lieu of a financial penalty as part of a settlement, plus they cover the cost of the investigation. that distinction matters more than it sounds. a settlement generally means the operator engaged early and put an action plan in place, and the Commission weighs that when setting the number
that said, this is the fourth enforcement action across the two Betfred entities in under four years.
 
Petfre (Gibraltar), the online arm:
  • £2.87m, September 2022, social responsibility and AML
  • £240,000, October 2025, online slot game breaches
  • £900,000, June 2026
Done Brothers (Cash Betting), the retail arm, roughly 1,300 to 1,400 shops:
  • £825,000, December 2025, social responsibility and AML in the shops
Worth adding that after an earlier action Petfre was required to bring in a third-party auditor specifically to prevent recurrence. This settlement covers a compliance assessment carried out in May and June 2024, so the failures were happening while that arrangement was in place.
 
so they paid someone to check they wouldn't do it again and then did it again
 
whats getting me is the timing. assessment was may june 2024. published end of june 2026. two years. two full years between them finding it and us hearing about it. how many accounts went through that seven day window while the paperwork was doing the rounds
 
geordiecolin said:
whats getting me is the timing. assessment was may june 2024. published end of june 2026. two years. two full years between them finding it and us hearing about it. how many accounts went through that seven day window while the paperwork was doing the rounds
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fair point mate but these do take a while, there's representations and negotiations and all sorts. not defending the delay just saying its not unusual
 
thats a thread of its own really. commission has been noticeably quiet on enforcement this year compared to 2022 through 2025 when they were doin multiple actions a quarter. rhodes went as chief exec. tim miller announced he was off end of june after ten years. two of the most senior people gone in a short window and the output dropped off at the same time.
june was the exception - stakelogic got £122,835 over responsible product design, then betfred a fortnight later. might be the new lot clearing a backlog. might be them setting a tone. nothing since, which tells you something or nothing depending on how you read it.
 
obviously dumb question to ask but where does those £900,000 actually go? does the person who lost the £17,900 get any of it back?
 
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