Sweden’s Administrative Court of Appeal has upheld fines totalling SEK44m (£3.3m) against bet365’s operating entity Hillside, dismissing its final appeal over duty-of-care and deposit-limit failures. The ruling, handed down in Jönköping, closes a legal challenge that has run since 2023 and confirms the Swedish regulator’s power to penalise even the largest licensed operators for player-protection shortfalls.
What happened
In a judgment against Hillside (Sports) ENC and a parallel judgment against Hillside (Gaming) ENC, both delivered in Jönköping on October 8, 2026, the Court of Appeal rejected the appeals and confirmed the lower court’s confidentiality rulings.
The court agreed with the Administrative Court in Linköping that both companies had committed serious breaches of the duty of care and the deposit-limit rules, and that a warning combined with a penalty fee of SEK 40 million for Hillside (Sports) ENC and SEK 4 million for Hillside (Gaming) ENC was a proportionate intervention.
The case traces back to
Spelinspektionen’s board issuing the original decisions on April 24, 2023: a warning and a SEK 65 million penalty fee against Hillside (Sports) ENC, and a warning and a SEK 14 million penalty fee against Hillside (Gaming) ENC, for deficiencies in the companies’ duty-of-care work.
Those figures were later reduced on a first appeal, with
judgments on June 13, 2024, changing the decisions only by lowering the fees to SEK 40 million and SEK 4 million, amounts the court found proportionate and fair given the breaches and the companies’ financial circumstances
.
The underlying violations concerned two separate failings. On duty of care,
Hillside had failed to take sufficiently prompt and effective action in multiple individual cases where customers exhibited signs of excessive or problematic gambling, relying excessively on automated communications such as pop-ups, emails and spend reminders, and was slow to escalate to manual reviews, with delays in imposing access restrictions despite continued risky player behaviour.
On deposit limits,
between 1 January 2019 and 18 April 2022, Hillside’s platform permitted customers to opt for a “no limit” deposit setting, bypassing the statutory requirement for an active cap per day, week and month, and although a technical ceiling of SEK500 million existed, it was not communicated or enforced as an active limit.
Why it matters
The confirmation that bet365 keeps its Swedish licence despite the adverse ruling is significant for operators weighing compliance investment against sanction risk.
Although the violations were considered serious, bet365 avoided losing its Swedish licences after introducing stronger responsible gambling controls, including manual reviews of high-loss customers and enhanced monitoring of higher-risk player groups.
That outcome signals to the market that Spelinspektionen treats demonstrable remediation as a mitigating factor, even where underlying failings are judged systemic.
The case also sets a clear evidentiary bar for what counts as adequate player protection. Regulators were unimpressed by arguments that the law permits “no limit” as a technical option:
Spelinspektionen described bet365’s interpretation as “shocking and indifferent to the obvious obligations of a gaming company to comply with the regulations and protect customers,” noting that deposit limits are an important tool the operator had allowed customers to opt out of for a very long time, constituting a serious and systemic violation.
For other licence holders in regulated Nordic and EU markets, this raises the practical compliance threshold around default settings and escalation timelines rather than leaving room for passive, automated-only interventions.
The bigger picture
This is not bet365’s first brush with Swedish enforcement. The regulator’s scrutiny of the operator dates back years, and the fine amounts have moved through multiple rounds of appeal before reaching this final confirmation.
Both companies appealed to the Administrative Court in Linköping
before escalating to the higher appeals court, a process that has taken roughly three years from the original 2023 decision to this month’s ruling.
The outcome fits a broader pattern across regulated European markets, where authorities are increasingly unwilling to accept automated or default-driven compliance as sufficient, instead expecting operators to intervene on individual player behaviour in close to real time. For affiliates and marketing partners working with licensed Nordic brands, rulings of this kind underline that player-protection performance is becoming as commercially material as product or pricing, since repeated enforcement action can affect an operator’s standing, marketing permissions and long-term licence security in a market that affiliates rely on for sustainable, compliant traffic.
For more on how European regulators are tightening scrutiny of operator conduct, see our industry news section.
Sources
- SBC News – bet365 handed hefty penalty fee but evades licence suspension in Sweden
- iGaming Business – Swedish appeals court upholds fines and warnings on Bet365 operator
- iGaming Expert – Swedish court backs bet365 penalty for deposit limit violations
- Focus Gaming News – Bet365 fined in Sweden over customer protection breaches
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