bet365 Sweden fine upheld as appeals court backs SEK 44m Hillside penalties

Sweden's Administrative Court of Appeal has upheld SEK 44m in penalties against bet365's Hillside entities, dismissing the operator's appeal against findings that it breached player-protection rules. Thursday's ruling confirms a SEK 40m penalty on Hillside (Sports) and SEK 4m on Hillside (Gaming), as iGB reports.

Two licences, two penalties

The breaches date from 2019 to 2022. SBC News has the period running from 1 January 2019 to 19 April 2022, while iGB ends it on 18 April 2022. Both arms of the business let players choose a "no limit" option when setting deposit limits. SBC News reports that Spelinspektionen ruled the statutory obligation to set an actual numeric limit was not met, even though a technical ceiling of SEK 500m existed. iGB says that ceiling was neither communicated nor enforced as an active limit, which made the option incompatible with Swedish law, where players must select an upper limit per day, week and month.

The court also sided with the regulator on duty of care. Chapter 14, Section 1 of the Swedish Gaming Act requires licence holders to monitor player activity continuously and intervene to prevent harm. Hillside was found to have relied excessively on automated messages, including pop-ups, emails and spend reminders, and to have escalated slowly to manual reviews or access restrictions while risky behaviour continued.

Spelinspektionen's file focused on the ten players with the highest losses over a two-month window, 17 October to 17 December 2021, with five profiles examined in more detail. All of them had triggered Hillside's internal early risk detection system, yet in some cases almost a month passed before stronger restrictions were applied.

Why the appeal failed

Hillside argued its detection system was effective overall and that the sample covered a fraction of its customers. It also said Swedish guidance was imprecise about the timing of interventions and that the "no limit" option was capped in practice. The courts rejected those arguments as insufficient to negate the breaches. The regulator described the deposit-limit failure as a long-standing systemic deficiency incompatible with the statutory framework.

SBC News adds scale to the case: bet365's Swedish sports operation posted SEK 724.5m in gross gaming revenue in 2021, with SEK 69m from gaming. On SBC's arithmetic, a single player reaching the hidden SEK 500m ceiling would have increased the operator's entire Swedish GGR by about 63%.

A warning instead of revocation

Spelinspektionen called the failures serious and systematic but chose a warning over revoking licences, because the companies put key corrective measures in place during and after the audit. Losses above SEK 10,000 a month now trigger manual review, checks come earlier for players aged 18 to 24 and for returning self-excluded players, and accounts have been suspended or restricted once internal high-risk triggers were logged.

Cooperation with the regulator, together with the rule that sanction fees cannot exceed 10% of an operator's annual turnover, brought the penalties down from proposed amounts of SEK 65m and SEK 14m. iGB records the SEK 4m gaming penalty as $401,010. bet365 declined to comment.

What it signals for other licensees

Sweden is not the only market where Hillside's player-protection record has been tested. The Dutch regulator Kansspelautoriteit issued a binding order against Hillside earlier this year over duty-of-care failures between 6 December 2024 and 6 June 2025, saying the company "did not adequately" respond to signals that players might no longer be able to afford their gambling.

In Sweden, bet365 ranks fourth on the Blask Index, behind state-owned ATG and Svenska Spel and the offshore NV casino, according to SBC News. Spelinspektionen has also acted against Betsson, ComeOn's Snabbare, Mr Green, ATG and Kanon Gaming over the past year or so. The industry group BOS argues that some of the rules being enforced lack an evidence base and links them to channelisation, with around 16% of players using black market sites.

On the reasoning the two outlets report, the practical point for UK-licensed operators holding Swedish licences is narrow: automated messaging alone is not enough where a player's activity keeps signalling risk, and uncertainty about regulatory guidance does not work as a defence. Neither report mentions a further appeal, so the SEK 44m stands.