Gambling Commission – New rules to make online gambling in Britain fairer and safer
The UK Gambling Commission has release new rules, following it’s open consultation with the industry about potential changes. The new rules will ensure that gambling operators verify customer’s age and identity sooner. There are two key areas, which they aim to improve.
Safer for Children
The current regulation requires operators to verify the age of their customers within 72 hours. Should the customer not be verified the operator is required to return stakes to the customer. The 72 hour window does allow someone who’s age hasn’t been verified to gamble and that could be someone under the age of 18. The new rules will prohibit a person from depositing funds into the account, placing a stake or even using free-to-play games until they their name, address and date of birth have been verified and that the person is also over the age of 18.
Fairer and Safer
A review of the online gambling sector by the Gambling Commission was published in March 2018. This review found that in some cases customers were being made to wait an unfair amount of time to withdraw funds from their account because the operator was still completing know your customer checks to meeting financial crime (AML) requirements. It was thought to be unfair because the process could have been performed sooner and the operator was effectively delaying the withdrawal of funds due to the process implemented. The changes will require the name, address and date of birth to be verified before the customer is allowed to gamble. In addition the customer must be made aware of the identity documents or other information that might be required, and how it should be supplied to the operator.
Adding identity verification at the point of signup will increase the effectiveness of services such as GamStop, which relies on matching to true information to be effective. One of the key matching elements for GamStop is the email address, the original consultation paper required the verification of name, address, date of birth and email address. The resulting consultation found that there was not an effective method for verifying that an email address and unsurprisingly this change was not implemented.