Aspire Global Fined £1.4 Million for AML and Social Responsibility Failures

The UK Gambling Commission has fined Aspire Global £1,407,384 after an investigation found failures in social responsibility and anti-money laundering.

AG Communications Limited, which trades as AspireGlobal, runs 58 white-label websites. The Commission has fined the company twice, first in 2022 with a £237,600 fine for AML failures.

The total fine will be contributed to socially responsible causes that are UKGC-approved. Past projects have included work with GambleAware, Gambling With Lives, and Swansea University.

Aspire Global’s Social Responsibility Breaches

Aspire was found to have made several mistakes regarding social responsibility. The first was not having effective systems in place to prevent customers from spending materially significant amounts of money in a short amount of time. This meant that an assessment was not made in an appropriate time to assess whether the customer was potentially at risk of gambling-related harm.

The company also failed to conduct any safer gambling protocol despite one customer losing £6,000 in just 48 hours. A telephone call was attempted, but only when the customer had reached a daily loss limit of £5,000 in 24 hours. Furthermore, another customer was able to deposit and lose £7,000 in four hours. A system error meant that the system failed to prevent the customer depositing above the backstop limit, and the company’s manual review of the customer failed to identify the fact that they had played through the backstop.

Aspire Global was also found to have failed to prevent one customer from opening a significant number of gambling accounts, despite the fact they had self-excluded from gambling.

Aspire Fails to Enforce Its Own Policy

An important part of anti-money laundering (AML) policy relates to the source of funds. Part of the reason that regulators are reticent about crypto iGaming is potential links to crime and misunderstandings around the functionality of blockchain and associated anonymity.

The UKGC found that Aspire’s AML and Counter-Terrorist Financing policies and procedures were too reliant on financial thresholds. The Commission said that when customers hit a medium, medium-high or high money laundering score, they were not subjected to a manual Enhanced Customer Due Diligence check until a financial trigger was hit.

Once a threshold was hit, completing checks was also significantly delayed. The regulator gives an example of a customer hitting a threshold and not having a review undertaken until a week later. Even where customers hit Aspire’s thresholds, the company was found to have failed to follow its policy.

John Pierce, Commission Director of Enforcement at the UKGC commented: “This case marks the second occasion that this operator has been subject to enforcement action. Its failure to uphold anti-money laundering standards, delays in necessary interventions, and deficiencies in social responsibility measures are wholly unacceptable.”

He continued: “Today’s outcome underscores the gravity of these breaches. It is essential that operators not only implement and maintain robust anti-money laundering policies, procedures, and controls but also act swiftly and decisively in response to any indications of suspicious activity. Effective social responsibility measures must be in place at all times to ensure that consumers identified as at risk receive timely and appropriate intervention.”

“This case stands as a clear warning to all operators that repeated regulatory failings will result in increasingly stringent enforcement action,” Pierce concluded.

UK Treasury Highlights Crypto Laundering Risk

With fiat-operators failing to adhere to their policy, it’s unsurprising that regulators are not warming to the idea of digital currency payments in iGaming.

The UK’s stance on crypto from both regulatory and government levels remains frosty. A 2024 treasury report concluded with data provided by the Financial Conduct Authority that crypto-asset companies were among the top four kinds of firms that were “particularly vulnerable” to financial crime, specifically money laundering.