Sweden’s Administrative Court of Appeal has rejected Bet365’s appeal against SEK44 million in penalties, upholding findings that two former Hillside licensees broke responsible gambling and deposit-limit rules. Hillside (Sports) ENC pays SEK40 million and Hillside (Gaming) ENC pays SEK4 million, with both companies also receiving formal warnings.
Spelinspektionen, Sweden’s Gambling Authority, announced the Oct. 8 judgments on Oct. 14. The appeal court sided with the earlier Administrative Court ruling that the breaches were serious and that the reduced penalties were proportionate, turning down both companies’ appeals.
The case goes back to April 2023, when Spelinspektionen sanctioned the two businesses after looking into how Bet365 dealt with players showing signs of potentially harmful gambling. The regulator examined the ten customers who lost the most money between Oct. 17 and Dec. 17, 2021, going through their deposits, withdrawals, betting activity, account limits, and communication with the operator.
Swedish rules require online players to set maximum deposit limits for a day, a week, and a month, and Hillside let customers pick “no limit” instead. The operator argued that accounts still had an internal technical ceiling of SEK500 million, but customers couldn’t see that limit, and Spelinspektionen ruled it didn’t satisfy the requirement for players to actively set a maximum amount. Problems turned up in Bet365’s intervention procedures as well as in the deposit-limit system itself.
Several of the biggest-losing customers had no effective limits during the review period. In the Hillside Sports case, six of the ten customers examined were missing at least one daily, weekly, or monthly limit, and four had no deposit limits at all. One customer was also allowed to raise all three limits substantially and lost SEK386,400 across the two months Spelinspektionen looked at.
On the casino side, one customer switched every deposit setting to “no limit” shortly after opening an account, then made 263 deposits and ten withdrawals during the review period and lost SEK105,833. Spelinspektionen also found that the customer’s deposits were getting more frequent and their gambling was running late into the night before Hillside sent any responsible gambling messages.
Spelinspektionen’s original penalties were far larger, at SEK65 million for Hillside Sports and SEK14 million for Hillside Gaming. The Administrative Court cut them to SEK40 million and SEK4 million in June 2024, taking into account a 2023 Supreme Administrative Court ruling that changed how gambling sanctions should be calculated. Spelinspektionen had itself argued for revised fines of SEK52 million and SEK5 million, but the court went lower than that.
Hillside then appealed again, contesting both the findings and the penalties, and the Administrative Court of Appeal has now left the 2024 amounts exactly where they were. It agreed that the duty-of-care and deposit-limit failures were serious enough to justify warnings on top of the financial sanctions.
Both cases relate to Bet365’s previous Swedish licences, held by Hillside Sports and Hillside Gaming until the end of 2023. Bet365 now operates in Sweden through Hillside (Europe) ENC, which holds licences for commercial online gaming and betting from Jan. 1, 2024 through Dec. 31, 2028.