German and EU courts open the door to billions in online gambling refunds

A series of court decisions in Germany and the EU is giving players a legal route to recover losses from online gambling operators that accepted bets while the activity was illegal in Germany between 2008 and 2021. For high-risk PSPs and gambling operators, the useful bit is simple: licensing status in the target market is now front and center in restitution claims, and the exposure may run into the billions of euros.

1. In September 2025, the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court ruled in favor of a player from Baden-Württemberg who sued Tipico Games, a Malta-based operator. The claimant said he had lost about 10,000 euros (approximately R$ 64,8 mil) between 2020 and 2022. Because online gambling was still banned in Germany until 2021, the court held that Tipico Games had received the money without legal basis and had to return it.
2. Tipico Games appealed to the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH), the highest civil and criminal court in Germany. In a preliminary hearing in mid-September 2026, the BGH agreed with a central point in the players’ argument: anyone who lost money on platforms without a valid German license has a right to restitution. The final ruling in the case is scheduled for January 2027.
3. In April 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) reinforced that position by ruling that each EU member state may prohibit or restrict online gambling individually, even if EU law otherwise permits it. For German players, that opens the door to claims for losses incurred during the period of national prohibition.
4. According to Deutsche Welle, the decisions could benefit thousands of players and trigger large-scale collective actions against operators based mainly in Malta and Cyprus, which kept offering online gambling to Germans during the ban. The period in question runs from 2008 to 2021, when almost all forms of online betting were prohibited in Germany.
5. Thomas Dünchheim, a gambling law specialist at Greenberg Traurig, said law firms are already gathering clients to prepare large collective claims, including with the use of artificial intelligence tools to identify potential claimants. The legal market is now treating these cases as a potential mass-recovery campaign, not a one-off dispute over a single player account.

For operators and payment providers, the practical takeaway is that accepting deposits into a market without local authorization can create long-tail restitution risk years later. In this case, the target is not just one Maltese merchant; it is a whole class of foreign operators that continued serving German players while the local ban was still in force.