Kindred Group pays £1.6m after UK customer bet with stolen funds

Online gambling operator Kindred Group has agreed to pay £1.6m after a UK gambling regulatory probe found one of its customers had gambled with stolen funds.

On Thursday, the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) announced that Kindred subsidiary Platinum Gaming Ltd (PGL), under which Kindred’s flagship brand Unibet is licensed, had agreed to return over £629k to the victims of one of its customers, while paying over £990k in lieu of a financial penalty to the UKGC.

The UKGC probe began after it received information that an unnamed individual had been convicted for stealing £2m and losing much of it to several gambling operators, including PGL. The UKGC said PGL’s customer made “large deposits” and incurred “significant losses in a very short period of time.”

The customer was registered as a PGL VIP within two days of first opening his/her account, and engaged in high-volume, often frenetic gambling activity that the UKGC maintains PGL should have identified as problem gambling behavior and taken steps to address.