Bet365 loses Swedish appeal over SEK40m and SEK4m fines for deposit limit breaches

Bet365 has lost its appeal in Sweden after courts upheld sanctions from Spelinspektionen over customer protection failures and deposit limit rules. For PSPs and gambling operators, the useful bit is not the headline fine size so much as the mechanism: a “no limit” deposit option was treated as non-compliant even though the system had an internal ceiling.

1. The Court of Appeal backed the Administrative Court’s earlier finding that Hillside (Gaming) ENC and Hillside (Sports) ENC, Bet365’s legal entities, committed serious and systematic breaches of duty of care and deposit limit rules between 2019 and 2022.
2. Spelinspektionen imposed two penalties: SEK40m (€3.5m) for the sports betting operation and SEK4m for the iGaming arm. The regulator said both businesses failed to comply with Sweden’s customer protection requirements.
3. The issue was not just the size of deposits, but the way limits were offered. Between January 1 2019 and April 19 2022, customers could select a “no limit” option when setting deposit restrictions. Bet365 had an undisclosed technical ceiling of SEK500m in the system, but Spelinspektionen said that did not meet the legal requirement to set a specific numerical deposit cap.
4. The numbers show why the regulator took the setup seriously. In 2021, Bet365 generated gross gaming revenue (GGR) of SEK724.5m from sports betting and SEK69m from its gaming business in Sweden. The regulator noted that a single customer hitting the technical cap would have represented an amount equivalent to around 63 per cent of the sports division’s annual GGR.
5. Bet365 kept its Swedish licences. Spelinspektionen issued a warning rather than revocation after the operator introduced stronger responsible gambling controls, including manual reviews of customers with monthly losses above SEK10,000 and additional monitoring for higher-risk groups such as players aged 18 to 24.

For the high-risk payments crowd, the lesson is straightforward: in Sweden, “we had an internal cap” is not the same thing as “the customer set a limit.” If your product flow allows a no-limit choice where a numeric limit is required, regulators will look at the control design, not just the backend ceiling.