Bet365's 2023 Swedish fine reduced to SEK44m on appeal

The Administrative Court of Linköping has reduced bet365’s 2023 fine totalling SEK79m despite resistance from the Swedish Gambling Authority (SGA).

The dispute stems from the SGA’s verdict that Hillside (Gaming) and Hillside (Sports), which offer both sports and casino betting via bet365.com, were both guilty of committing “serious violations of the duty of care and the regulations on deposit limits”.

In April last year, Hillside (Gaming) was handed a SEK14m fine, while Hillside (Sports) was slapped with a penalty of SEK65m, giving bet365 a total fine of SEK79m.

Those figures have since been reduced following the court’s ruling on 13 June, with the total to be paid by the Stoke-on-Trent-based firm now reduced to SEK44m (£3.3m).

Hillside (Gaming) will pay SEK4m, with Hillside (Sports) penalised for a fee of SEK40m.

The reduction in the fines came after bet365 appealed the initial decision from the regulator, claiming the small dataset based on five customer accounts was not representative of its entire business operations.

As detailed in the firm’s response to the fine, bet365 stated: “It is unfortunately not realistic to expect that licensees who operate large-scale operations with several hundreds of thousands of customers achieve 100% compliance with the SGA’s vaguely defined criteria.

“The SGA’s approach sends a skewed message to the market.”

When determining how much of a penalty fee bet365 should receive, the company’s net turnover is taken into account, as per Swedish regulations.

In this instance, Hillside (Gaming) net sales for 2021, when the alleged violations took place, amounted to around SEK69m. The maximum penalty a firm can be hit with equates to 10% of annual net turnover.

In this regard, the SGA had called for the company to be hit with a SEK5m fine, but the court instead ordered Hillside (Gaming) to pay SEK4m as punishment, down from the original SEK14m penalty.

That figure is significantly higher than the SEK490,000 Hillside (Gaming) had appealed to have the penalty reduced to. 

Regarding Hillside (Sports), the same factors were taken into consideration and the administrative court reduced the initial fee to SEK40m, based on bet365’s 2021 turnover of SEK720m.

Similarly to the dispute with the gaming arm, the SGA had called for a larger penalty fee than the one eventually levied, with the regulator advocating for a reduction to SEK52m, while the operator sought a SEK5m fine.

The penalties initially came as a result of an investigation into bet365 in December 2021 to determine whether the operator was ensuring all players had an upper deposit limit for daily, weekly and monthly play.

The investigation concluded that the company had only required bettors returning from self-suspension to set deposit limits. 

Bet365 maintained the company fulfilled all duty of care requirements, with the help of its automated system designed to detect at-risk behaviour and problem gambling patterns.

However, Swedish regulations state that licensed operators must contact players who wish to raise their respective deposit limit or deposit more than SEK10,000 per month.

On those grounds, the SGA determined that bet365 had used its automated system to send the players in question spending reminders that were ultimately ignored. 

The investigation, which analysed customers gameplay between 17 October 2021 and 17 December 2021, also found one player had been able to lose SEK259,372 in just two months after placing 240 bets, as well as gambling daily for four consecutive weeks.

Another customer was discovered to have had no deposit limit in place on their account and in those two months made 105 deposits and just one withdrawal, losing SEK104,512 in the process.

Bet365 has the right to launch a second appeal in response to both decisions from the court.