Sweden bans duel.com operator Immortal Snail LLC, but the site still appears in Swedish

The Swedish Gambling Authority, Spelinspektionen, has issued an immediate ban to Immortal Snail LLC, the company behind offshore bookmaker duel.com. The problem for anyone trying to police this sort of thing is that the operator’s response reads less like compliance and more like a checklist of reasons regulators will keep chasing it.

1. Spelinspektionen says duel.com is operated by Immortal Snail LLC under a licence from the Anjouan Gaming Authority, but the site has no licence to operate in Sweden or in the other markets mentioned by the regulator and the Blask Index: the US, Canada, India, Finland, Germany, Poland, Norway and Spain.
2. The regulator framed the ban as a consumer protection measure. In practice, the more interesting question is enforcement: many illegal operators simply ignore penalty fees or continue operating after receiving notices from regulators, and the filing suggests Immortal Snail LLC is not taking the Swedish order seriously.
3. According to Spelinspektionen, Immortal Snail LLC said that “Swedish is an international language,” that Sweden “should be IP-blocked,” that it cannot control whether payments are made in SEK, and that it should not stop offering Swedish as a language on the website. That is not the language of a company preparing for a tidy exit from a market.
4. The regulator’s investigation says the promised controls were not even in place: “the IP blocking against Sweden has not been implemented.” It also said that “the Swedish currency SEK and Swedish as a language still appear when logging in from a Swedish IP address,” and that there was continued Swedish-language marketing on duel.com.
5. Duel.com has already drawn attention for aggressive marketing, including social media clips involving adult content creators performing sex acts over blackjack tables and other advertisements featuring paid actors in Nazi German era military uniforms. For PSPs, acquirers and banks, that is the kind of traffic pattern that tends to attract regulatory scrutiny long before the compliance team finishes its second coffee.