Sweden’s top court concludes that Betsson must refund gambler €500,000
The Swedish Supreme Court has issued a definitive judgment in a drawn-out legal case.
Sweden.- The Swedish Supreme Court has made a definitive ruling in the case of a player who sued the online gambling operator Betsson over historic player protection failings. The court has ordered Betsson subsidiary BML Group to repay €500,000 in losses.
The claimant was said to have spent around €15m on online slot games, incurring losses of around €727,000. They argued that Betsson continued to send promotional material and ads despite knowing that they had a gambling problem. The Patent and Market Court of Appeal had already ruled in the claimant’s favour in December 2023, but BML appealed against the verdict.
The case refers to wagers made between 2009 and 2014, before the introduction of regulated online gambling under the Swedish Gambling Act of 2019. Since the market was unregulated at the time, the current player protection rules wer enot in place.
Betsson CEO Pontus Lindwall has said that the ruling is unlikely to significantly affect the company financially. “These proceedings relate to actions taken more than ten years ago under a completely different regulatory framework. Our commitment to responsible gaming and compliance remains stronger than ever,” he said.
However, the Supreme Court’s ruling raises the question of whether other retrospective cases could emerge involving other players or other operators who provided gambling to Swedish players before the current licensing model was introduced under the oversight of the national gambling regulator, Spelinspektionen.
Betsson says that in the second half of 2024, 18.7 per cent of contacted users opted to make use of its self-exclusion tools, higher than the market average.
Meanwhile, Spelinspektionen is to appeal against a court ruling that quashed a €9.1m fine issued against Svenska Spel. The regulator issued the penalty in March 2024 for deficiencies in the state-controlled gambling operator’s duty of care, but the Administrative Court decided earlier this month that the fine was disproportionate.
In its appeal, Spelinspektionen argues that the conclusion conflicts with previous court decisions and the Swedish Gambling Authority’s own assessment of the scope of the duty of care. It noted that the court had agreed with the regulator’s assessment that all customers examined had excessive gambling. However, the Administrative Court found that the regulator had not shown that Svenska Spel had failed in its duty of care in such a way as to constitute grounds for intervention.
