The UK Gambling Commission (GC) slammed International Multi-Media Entertainments Limited (IMME) in a recent investigation. Commissioners said that the company’s gambling license would have been revoked at the conclusion of the investigation, had it not already been suspended in March 2021.
IMME is licensed as a lottery operator and offers opportunities to wager on international lotteries.
IMME’s list of anti-money laundering and social responsibility violations is long and particularly damming due its targeting of elderly customers. According to the UKGC report, approximately 75 percent of IMME’s customers were over the age of 60 and 20 percent were over the age of 80.
Gambling Commission investigators could hardly contain their disgust with the company as they described incredibly egregious violations, including, “…one customer, who was 100 years old at the time the Commission review was started, bet £23,839 in just five months. His deposits more than doubled from £2,992 in September 2018 to £6,090 in October 2018 and continued to rise but IMME did not obtain source of funds evidence.”
Helen Venn, Gambling Commission Executive Director didn’t mince words either in her conclusion on the IMME affair saying, “We will not tolerate gambling businesses behaving in the way IMME did.
“Gambling operators in Britain must follow our social responsibility and anti-money laundering rules, and a failure to do this will lead to us taking tough action.
“We suspended IMME’s licence following initial concerns and – having delved even deeper into the business’s activities – discovered failures that would have inevitably led to complete licence revocation had the operator not surrendered it.
“There is no room in Britain’s gambling industry for operators who fail in the way IMME have.”
Officials in the UK have been taking the hard line with operators who fall out of compliance for a while now and this particularly egregious case made their jobs a whole lot easier.