Willam HIll were recently fined just under £13 Million for failing to 'safeguard' account holders against spending their own money.
According to the above article the main problem was they were not doing sufficient checks on new account holders before they deposited, gambled and then lost said money.
In once case one individual was able to deposit £23K without any checks, and in another an individual was able to bet £100K rather than his £70K limit without any checks.
It's an interesting insight into the mentality of government regulators: gambling companies have a 'duty of care' over their clients: they have to know at least something about them and put a PAUSE on larger deposits.
I guess the theory is that in the pause time people may think twice about betting huge sums of money which they risk losing.
Of course this is targeted at protecting people who have problems with gambling, but I'm not sure in the above two cases this is what's going on - it's unlikely that people with gambling problems are going to be betting SO MUCH money in one go, this is probably professional gamblers on a system I would imagine.
Blocking TXs out of a 'duty of care'...?
I think this sort of government regulation is very specific to gambling companies, but is it appropriate, even this?
It certainly doesn't fit with the crypto-ethos that NO ONE has the right to stop you doing WHATEVER you like with your money - radical responsibility.
And part of me thinks if someone has got as far as opening up an account with a betting company, let them spend as much as they fucking want on one bet...
But then again gambling is a KNOWN addiction and so MAYBE in this very specific case this sort of regulation is justified. I mean a little bit of inconvenience to potentially save an addict thousands may not be so bad in the grand scheme of things.
And gambling companies make fat profits, after all, much of it off the back of encouraging addictive behaviour.
I'm not going to employ the fallacy of a slippery slope argument: just because the UK government had sanctions in place for betting companies who fail to block TXs without due diligence doesn't mean they are going to start slapping similar regulations on EVERY company in different contexts...
But this may be posturing rather than affective...
Having said this, stopping only large deposits may be wholly ineffective. I doubt if most gambling addicts are going to have the resources to deposit thousands in one go (I mean if they're addicts, it's mostly gone, right?) and possibly the problem lies in lots of smaller bets over the medium term which this kind of regulation won't help with.
Oh, and in terms of the fine, that's not gonna stop William Hill: £12 million hardly touches the £0.5 billion they made in profits in 2022!