High-spending online gamblers to face financial risk checks

Gamblers who spend more than £1,000 online in a 24-hour window will have to undergo a financial risk assessment, the industry regulator has announced.

The Gambling Commission said this would also apply to anyone spending over £3,000 in a rolling 90-day period. Under-25s will have lower thresholds.

The assessments will be based on data held by credit reference agencies, but the commission has insisted they are not “affordability checks”.

Operators will use the information to help them identify gamblers at risk of financial harm or in financial difficulty.

The commission has not set a timeline for the changes saying they will be introduced in a “very careful, staged way”.

The checks will start with over-25s who gamble more than £5,000 in a rolling 24-hour period. The watchdog says this will affect less than 0.5% of customers. It will begin following engagement companies and other stakeholders over the summer.

The threshold will eventually be lowered to £1,000 in 24 hours.

In 2023, a white paper on gambling recommended enhanced checks on customers experiencing very high losses.

On Tuesday, the commission said high-spending gamblers were between two and four times more likely to have a debt management plan, and between two and five times more likely to have a default in the previous 12 months than consumers in the wider population.

The commission has been looking into whether gambling companies can use credit reference data to spot customers at risk of financial harm.

The acting chief executive of the Gambling Commission, Sarah Gardner, said the vast majority of customers would “never, ever” require an assessment.

Those who do would have a frictionless, document-free assessment provided by credit reference agencies, with no impact on their credit score.

The commission has insisted that the assessments are not the same as affordability checks, which Gardner said were “deeply unpopular” with gamblers.

She added that stakeholders had expressed concerns that more regulation could push problem gamblers onto the black market.