Spelinspektionen bans duel.com, operator refuses to comply
Sweden's gambling regulator has ordered an immediate halt to duel.com, but Immortal Snail LLC has pushed back on demands to block Swedish customers.
Spelinspektionen, the Swedish Gambling Authority, has issued an immediate ban against Immortal Snail LLC, the operator behind offshore betting site duel.com, SBC News reported.
The regulator said the action was taken "in the interests of consumer protection". Duel.com holds no licence in Sweden and instead runs its .com platform under authorisation from the Anjouan Gaming Authority.
According to data from the Blask Index cited by SBC News, duel.com also has a presence in the United States, Canada, India, Finland, Germany, Poland, Norway and Spain. It is not licensed in any of those markets either.
Immortal Snail LLC's response to the banning order, as recorded in Spelinspektionen's filing, suggests little appetite for compliance. The company stated that Swedish is an international language and argued that Sweden itself should be IP-blocked, rather than accepting responsibility for restricting access.
The filing also records the operator saying it "cannot control whether payments are made in the Swedish currency SEK", and that it should not be required to drop Swedish as a language option on its site.
Spelinspektionen's investigation found none of the operator's suggested fixes had actually been put in place. The regulator said IP blocking against Sweden had not been implemented, and that SEK and the Swedish language still appeared when logging in from a Swedish IP address. It also noted continued Swedish-language marketing of the duel.com website.
The ban adds to a pattern of controversy around the Saint Kitts and Nevis-based operator, whose marketing has repeatedly drawn criticism. Campaigns have included adult content creators performing sex acts over blackjack tables and paid actors dressed in Nazi German-era military uniforms, both circulated widely on social media.
SBC News noted that enforcement against an operator unwilling to geofence Swedish users, and reachable via a VPN regardless, raises doubts over how effective the ban will be in practice.
The case feeds into a wider debate over the role of Big Tech platforms in policing illegal gambling advertising, an issue the UK's Gambling Commission has repeatedly raised. Dutch trade body VNLOK has gone as far as summoning Meta to court over the same concern.
By contrast, Aland Islands operator Paf has struck an experimental agreement with Meta aimed at restricting illegal gambling adverts on its platforms, an approach SBC News suggested could offer a model for tackling operators such as duel.com if adopted more broadly.