Mr Green Sees Fines From UK Gambling Commission

Fines Come Down on Mr Green

In the United Kingdom, one of the things that makes their jurisdiction so popular and reputable is that the UKGC is so serious about making sure that players are taken care of as much as they can. One of the ways they do this is by looking into an individual’s background if they deposit a large sum of money, even if it’s over a period of time.

The reputable online casino Mr Green has allegedly run afoul of these rules in a few cases, and they’re seeing major fines as a result.

The whole idea here is that the Gambling Commission wants to make sure that stolen or otherwise ill-gotten gains aren’t laundered through online casinos that they license, and they also want to make sure that people who need help with compulsive gambling aren’t taking out loans or otherwise gambling with money that the UKGC feels they shouldn’t.

In any case, it’s not an unreasonable position to have, but that hasn’t kept some of the most reputable companies in the world from violating these rules.

Details on the Fine

The fine is worth about £3 million and will be going to the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms, so it’s essentially a forced donation. These types of penalties aren’t used for profit and are ideally used to help with the funding for the programs that fight problem gambling.

There were three cases that came up that led to the fine itself, and we’re going to briefly look at each of them here:

1. In one case, they allowed a cryptocurrency account screenshot to be used as adequate proof of a source of funding. This isn’t allowed because there’s no real proof of the source of the funds, only that they are in an account, and there are also issues of proving that the account even belongs to the individual in question.
2. In another case, a player who deposited more than £1 million was asked for proof of the source of their funding, and Mr Green accepted proof that the player had been given a £176,000 court judgment a decade earlier as sufficient.
3. Another case had them completely ignore that a player had deposited over £50,000, lost it, and continued to deposit beyond that.

These cases are clearly in violation of the rules that the UK Gambling Commission has on this sort of thing, but this fine has a lot of people wondering if it’s a bit excessive.

The Argument Against

Some people believe that there’s too much of a burden being placed on the operators like Mr Green to verify personal information like where players are getting their funding from and that it should fall on some other party like the Gambling Commission themselves.

The reasoning behind this is that operators deal with thousands of players, and the resources required to verify income and other information for all of them are a massive expense that’s expected to come out of the casino’s bottom line. Some people, including many industry experts, believe that these expenses should come from the UKGC’s share of the profits.

Again, that’s not an unreasonable position to take, and there’s a lot of merit to that point of view. In any case, however, Mr Green violated the rules they agreed to when they took on their license, and now they’re having to pay for it.

The Reputation of Mr Green

While this fine obviously isn’t a good look for Mr Green, players shouldn’t take this as if they’re a bad casino to play at. They’re actually one of the most reputable in the world, and the three cases above are just examples of them needing to fine-tune processes that are already in place to stick to these particular rules.