About a fortnight ago, Spillemyndigheden, the Danish Gambling Authority officially launched a whistleblower program that is aimed at combating money laundering with the country’s regulated gambling industry. The initiative will allow employees to report any evidence of the violation or even potential violation of Denmark’s anti-money laundering legislation.
How It Works
The gaming regulators provided many more details pertaining to the whistleblower initiative. All of the whistleblowers will be able to provide information on the violation or potential money-laundering activities through a dedicated and anonymous form. This will then trigger an investigation into the matter. All of these submissions will also be encrypted to ensure that they are secure.
As far as the investigations are concerned, the Danish Gambling Authority further clarified that it would proceed to conduct a thorough legal assessment of each and every submission it receives in order to determine the best course of action. As such, the regulator will be able to weed out false alarms and focus on only the violators.
Denmark’s Money Laundering Problem
In Denmark, Spillemyndigheden is the body that is tasked with overseeing the implementation of anti-money laundering tools and safeguards. This role involves the supervision of both online and land-based casino operators – these include those that provide their services in the country as well as those that are based in the country but provide their services to international markets. The goal is to closely monitor the operations of these companies in order to detect and handle any and all potential violations of the country’s Anti-Money Laundering Act.
The new initiative is part of the regulator’s plans to strengthen consumer protections throughout the year. In fact, the regulator has already even issued warning to some of the licensees with regards to the promotion of bonus offers. On the same note, over a month ago, the Danish Gambling Regulator also blocked access to a total of 25 gambling websites after petitioning the Danish telecommunication providers.
Other Projects
In addition to the new whistleblower initiative, the gambling regulator in the annual report for 2018 also revealed that it would be initiating two additional projects in a bid to strengthen monitoring policies related to terrorism financing and money laundering. Both of these projects are anticipated to be completed before the end of the year.
One of these projects involves the collection of organizational data from locally licensed online gambling companies. The goal of this project is to identify how serious the individual license holders are about their responsibility to fight money laundering.
The second project, on the other hand, involves the provision of land-based services as well as the tools and safeguards that have been implemented by gambling facilities in order to combat money laundering and other financial crimes.
