Affordability checks driving a 'massive worldwide money laundering issue', warns leading financial crime expert

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Affordability checks are supercharging the threat of black market bookmakers being used for money laundering and of punters becoming debanked, according to an expert in financial crime.

Worst still, the British government is “asleep at the wheel and seemingly blind” to the risk, and financial institutions have yet to grasp the seriousness of people making themselves vulnerable through using illegal bookmakers to being debanked, which can wreak havoc by cutting them off from access to banking systems.

The warnings come from Jeremy Asher, a lawyer specialising in fraud and co-founder of the Financial Fraud Awareness Campaign, which seeks to raise awareness of financial crime and provide education to help prevent people falling victim.

Asher, a long-time racing fan, will use a speech at the Annual Economic Crime Experts Directory Conference this month to emphasise the importance of adding black market betting to the government’s National Risk Assessment (NRA) covering money laundering and terrorist financing.

However, with the Gambling Commission board meeting on May 21 set to potentially sign off the implementation of affordability checks, Asher said it was essential that the government and banks recognised what the measures could mean before then.

He said: “I was shocked when I read the NRA and saw that black market gambling was not there at all. This is a huge risk that is being overlooked. 

“Let’s be frank about it – this is a real, live, and rapidly growing existential threat to the regulated sector, with consequential knock-on effects in loss of revenue to the Treasury and loss of livelihoods in the bookmaking and horseracing industries. 

"The government is asleep at the wheel and seemingly blind to these very real and live risks that it has created. 

“Reports indicate that it is not listening to racing and bookmaking – perhaps it will listen to the counter fraud community instead? A massive worldwide money laundering issue is being created before our eyes.”

Asher added that funds entering the black market were likely to stay there, with decentralised systems such as cryptocurrency being used for withdrawals, and potentially recycled into further illicit activity.

Punters migrating from the regulated market to the black market could also find themselves at serious risk of being cut off from banks and locked out of day-to-day financial systems if deemed to be participating in illegal activity.

Asher said: “Do those tempted to use unregulated bookmakers and gambling sites understand the risks they are taking in relation to the potential for them to be debanked? After all, they will struggle to argue that their winnings have not potentially been merged with criminal property?

“The finance and counter fraud communities need to step in here and align against government and Gambling Commission proposals.”

The frustration punters are feeling with affordability checks was highlighted in the results of a survey released this week by freebets.com, which found that 31 per cent of the 1,238 respondents said their betting had been made worse by the checks.

On Tuesday, Tim Miller, executive director at the Gambling Commission, said that any checks would be done “in a collaborative way with industry”, but added that “you can't properly evaluate something until it has actually been rolled out".

A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: “The government is taking decisive action to tackle all forms of illegal gambling. At the budget, we announced £26 million of funding to help the Gambling Commission tackle the illegal market and recently launched the Illegal Gambling Taskforce, which is working to crack down on unlicensed advertising, payments and financial crime.

“Financial risk assessments for online gambling customers are a consumer protection that was put forward in the white paper and, if introduced by the Gambling Commission, would only be targeted at customers experiencing high levels of financial loss."

Read these next:

Affordability checks will be evaluated 'in the real world' despite calls for a pause in their implementation 

Astonishing and unacceptable: key DCMS adviser quits in disgust over plan to roll out affordability checks 

Flutter chief executive Peter Jackson calls on Gambling Commission to 'think again' about affordability checks 

New report claims black market gambling has more than tripled to nearly £17 billion since 2019 

How ChatGPT and AI chatbots help punters to bypass affordability checks and bet on the black market 

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