The Swedish Gambling Authority today announced that it has slapped hefty fines to four locally licensed operators for taking bets on sporting events that involved a majority of underage athletes.
The latest operators to be punished by the Swedish gambling watchdog were ComeOn Sweden Ltd, which operates the comeon.com and comeon.se websites, Hajper Ltd., which operates hajper.com, Legolas Invest Ltd., which runs legolas.bet and mobile.legolas.bet, and Faster Ltd., which operates faster.com.
News about the latest penalties issued by Spelinspektionen arrived after the regulator punished last month eight locally licensed companies for similar violations. Gambling giants bet365, The Stars Group, and Flutter Entertainment Group were among those penalized by the agency last month.
Spelinspektionen said today that it has moved to issue the latest four fines after it discovered that the affected operators handled wagers on sports events in which the majority of the participants were under the age of 18.
Under Swedish gambling law, locally licensed operators are prohibited from taking bets on events that feature children. For example, companies must not handle bets on U19 and U21 games.
Aside from hefty six- and seven-figure fines, the erring operators also received warning by Spelinspektionen, meaning that any future violations could get them in an even bigger regulatory trouble.
The Fined Operators
In a statement on its official website, Spelinspektionen said that it has slapped a SEK6 million (approx. $620,070 million) fine on ComeOn for its violations. ComeOn is part of Swedish gambling group Cherry AB. As mentioned above, the online gambling operator runs the comeon.com and comeon.se websites on the territory of the Scandinavian nation. Last month, it announced that it is poised to extend its Scandinavian presence after being awarded a sports betting and an online casino license in Denmark.
Hajper was slapped with a SEK4.5 million (approx. $465,052) fine by Spelinspektionen, the regulator said earlier today. The company is licensed to operate the hajper.com website in Sweden.
Legolas Invest was ordered to pay SEK100,000 (approx. $10,334) for its violations. Of the four recently fined operators, Faster was the one to be imposed the largest fine. The company was slapped with a SEK9.5 million ($981,777) penalty fee for taking bets that violated Swedish law on its faster.com website.
Since the reorganization of the Swedish online gambling market, Spelinspektionen has fined multiple operators for violations of different nature, including ones relating to the country’s bonus offer rules and self-exclusion policies.
In June, the regulator revoked the license of Global Gaming, citing serious deficiencies in the company’s KYC and anti-money laundering practices. Global Gaming is the operator of the Ninja Casino brand. The company immediately appealed Spelinspektionen’s decision, but was ordered to suspend its Swedish operations while its license revocation was under review.
Global Gaming sought to be allowed to resume its operations in Sweden while the review was underway, but three courts have so far ruled against its return to the local market.
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