Paddy Power and Betfair have reached a £2m settlement with the gambling industry regulator over social responsibility failings, including allowing one customer to bet for nearly eight hours solid.
The Gambling Commission said the online betting and gaming brands, which are owned by Flutter Entertainment, had fallen “far short” of what was expected during a routine compliance assessment performed in 2024.
Systems that were supposed to detect early indicators that gamblers may be experiencing harm and trigger checks on their wellbeing were found to have been insufficiently sensitive, resulting in late intervention.
Failings identified by the Gambling Commission included one customer being allowed to stake £86,000 over a 16-day period, during which time they lost £6,000.
“Despite the high velocity of spend, no manual review of the account took place,” the regulator said.
In another case, a gambler displayed “concerning behaviour in terms of intense spikes of activity” in their betting over a 17-day period without any intervention to check on their spending.
During that period, their longest session lasted seven hours and 46 minutes, during which they placed 300 bets amounting to £20,000, more than £2,500 an hour.
The account was only reviewed after the gambler hit a threshold triggered automatically by a certain degree of losses.
The £2m settlement agreed between Flutter and the Gambling Commission is equivalent to slightly less than two hours worth of takings for the company, which is listed in London and New York and reported revenue of £10.5bn last year.
It is the company’s second fine in three years. It paid £490,000 in 2023 after accidentally sending promotional push notification to customers who had signed up to exclude themselves from gambling, inviting them to bet on a football match.
John Pierce, the Gambling Commission’s director of enforcement, said the fine reflected “the seriousness of the failings identified and the importance of meeting social responsibility and customer interaction standards”.
“Our compliance assessment in 2024 uncovered examples where interactions fell far short of what is required. These failings should never have occurred,” he added.
“While the licensees cooperated fully with the investigation, accepted the failings early, and implemented an action plan quickly, this immediate response is the minimum we expect from operators when serious shortcomings are identified.”
A spokesperson for Flutter said the company took its safer gambling responsibilities seriously and firmly believed it led the industry in player protection.
“Customer safety is our number one priority and there is no suggestion that any of the customers reviewed by the Gambling Commission experienced any harm,” they said.
“Our controls have evolved significantly and we recently introduced a next-generation customer safety platform, with the vast majority of checks now happening in real-time.
“As such, we are confident that the issues highlighted by the commission in its public statement would not be repeated today. We continue to invest in our technology and our people to raise standards in the regulated industry.”
