bet365 fined SEK 44m in Sweden but keeps licence intact
Spelinspektionen found systematic deposit-limit failures at Hillside's sports and gaming arms but opted for a warning after corrective action.
Sweden's gambling regulator Spelinspektionen has issued separate financial penalties against Hillside, the legal entity behind bet365, over failures in customer protection and deposit-limit controls, SBC News reported.
The sports betting arm of the business was handed a SEK 40m (£3m) penalty, with the gaming division fined a further SEK 4m, according to the regulator's findings.
Spelinspektionen said the violations ran from 1 January 2019 to 19 April 2022, during which both sides of bet365's Swedish operation allowed customers to select a 'no limit' option when setting their deposit caps.
Although there was a technical ceiling of SEK 500m sitting behind that option, the regulator ruled this did not satisfy the statutory requirement for operators to set an actual numeric limit.
The scale of that hidden threshold is notable against bet365's own trading figures: its Swedish sports betting arm generated gross gaming revenue of SEK 724.5m in 2021, with the gaming business adding SEK 69m. A single player reaching the SEK 500m technical limit would have increased the operator's entire Swedish GGR by roughly 63%.
Spelinspektionen described the failures as both serious and systematic, yet stopped short of revoking bet365's licences, pointing to corrective measures the company introduced during and after the regulatory audit.
Those changes include a manual review process triggered once a player loses more than SEK 10,000 in a month, along with earlier intervention checks aimed at young adults aged 18 to 24 and players returning from self-exclusion.
Hillside is also reported to have suspended or restricted accounts where internal high-risk triggers were recorded.
The regulator said cooperation during its investigation, combined with the remedial steps and a statutory cap limiting sanctions to 10% of an operator's annual turnover, reduced the penalties from an initial SEK 65m and SEK 14m to the amounts now imposed.
bet365 remains one of the dominant brands in the Swedish market, ranked fourth by the Blask Index behind state-owned operator AB Trav och Galopp, Svenska Spel, and the offshore-licensed NV casino.
Spelinspektionen has stepped up enforcement across the licensed sector over the past year, with SBC News noting recent action against Betsson, ComeOn Group's Snabbare brand, Mr Green, AB Trav och Galopp and Kanon Gaming.
The crackdown has not gone unchallenged. Sweden's Trade Association for Online Gambling, BOS, has argued that some of Spelinspektionen's rules lack evidence-based justification and are contributing to flat channelisation rates, with around 16% of Swedish players currently active on unlicensed platforms.
SBC News noted that concern is not unreasonable given that an unlicensed operator is understood to rank as the third-largest in the country by activity.
Even so, the penalty underlines that licensed operators remain bound by Sweden's deposit-limit rules regardless of market position, and SBC News suggested the fine is unlikely to meaningfully dent bet365's wider profitability even as regulatory and tax pressure builds across several of its international markets.