Betting company fined €225,000 for ‘lax’ money laundering safeguards
Systemic failures in way customer transactions were monitored
A Malta-based betting company has been fined €225,000 for its “lax” approach to anti-money laundering safeguards.
Stanleybet Malta Limited, a Maltese subsidiary of the Stanleybet Group, was hit with the fine and daily penalties of €2,000 by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU), an anti-money laundering body, following a targeted review of the company’s operations last year.
The company, which operates a network of physical gaming shops outside Malta, was found to have “systemic failures” in the way it monitored cumulative customer transactions across its different betting shops.
Stanleybet relied on betting shop employees recognising customers by sight, a method the FIAU dismissed as inherently unreliable.
The FIAU said customers could visit multiple shops in the same town or city on the same day, effectively circumventing the legal €2,000 deposit threshold that triggers customer due diligence obligations.
According to the FIAU, Stanleybet had no complete list of its end customers and was therefore incapable of assessing their money laundering or terrorism financing risks.
The customer list the company was able to produce was limited to those customers whose deposits exceeded €2,000 in a single transaction.
When customer profiles were collected, the information was deemed inadequate, as customer records only captured generic employment descriptions such as “employed” or “student”, with source-of-funds entries limited to broad terms like “savings” or “wages”.
Some fields were left blank entirely.
Apart from the €225,000 fine, Stanleybet was hit with daily penalties of €2,000 until it addresses the “urgent need” to ensure it is capable of identifying the transactions executed by its customers across its network of betting shops.
In addition to the financial penalties, the FIAU issued a follow-up directive requiring Stanleybet to produce a detailed action plan for overhauling its compliance systems.
The FIAU said that while Stanleybet has been cooperative throughout the process and has undertaken anti-money laundering training for its betting shop operators, this fell well short of addressing the systemic failures at hand.
It warned that Stanleybet’s lapses “could have led to the unintentional facilitation” of money laundering and exposed Malta to unmanaged financial crime risks.