Petfre (Gibraltar) Limited, which runs betfred.com, agreed to pay £900,000 in a settlement with the UK Gambling Commission after an investigation into social responsibility failures.
The Commission said the case followed a compliance assessment carried out between May and June 2024 and a licence review under section 116 of the Gambling Act. That review found failings in Petfre’s social responsibility controls and remote customer interaction procedures.
According to the regulator’s public statement, the problems ran from 31 October 2023 to 24 June 2024. The Commission said Petfre did not have sufficiently effective systems to minimise the risk of gambling harm, in breach of SRCP 3.4.3.
SRCP 3.4.3 requires operators to implement customer interaction systems that identify, act and evaluate as an ongoing process. The Commission said Petfre’s approach fell short because it relied on delayed processes and lacked the automated tools needed to respond quickly enough.
One issue was a seven-day reflagging delay. Once an account had been flagged for a safer-gambling review, it could not be flagged again for another review for seven days, which meant further warning signs were not acted on promptly.
The regulator also said Petfre had not clearly defined “strong indicators of harm” in its policy and did not have automated processes in place to deal with them. It found the operator failed to flag those indicators in time for manual intervention or to feed them into automated processes as required.
In one example set out by the Commission, a customer was contacted after passing a deposit trigger, no further action was taken, and the customer then deposited and lost a further £17,900 within 24 hours without another intervention.
John Pierce, the Commission’s director of enforcement, said the failure to implement an effective monitoring framework to identify and contact consumers at risk of harm at pace had resulted in a significant regulatory settlement. The Commission also said Petfre moved quickly to put interim mitigating controls in place and later delivered an action plan to show its operating model now meets regulatory requirements.
