An administrative court in Sweden has upheld the anti-money laundering penalties against Betsson, Snabbare and Spooniker by Spelinspektionen after establishing that these operators haven’t satisfied the requirements of customer due diligence.
This ruling reaffirms the regulator’s decision to impose fines and warnings in May 2025 after determining that the three operators had failed to comply with the rules of verifying the origin of customers’ funds. The operators claimed that the regulator interpreted the AML rules in a strict manner.
The court upheld the imposition of SEK 10 million (€906,700) in fines on Spooniker, SEK 6.5 million (€589,400) on Betsson, and SEK 5.5 million (€498,700) on Snabbare.
According to Spelinspektionen, the operators haven’t done a sufficient job in inspecting the source of the customers’ funds and this conclusion was based on the discrepancies in deposit values reported by customers in comparison to the income that they declared.
The process of the investigation was based on the analysis of the deposits made by 50 clients who placed the highest amount of deposits in 2023 aged 18 to 29 in the examined companies.
In one case, one of the Betsson customers made deposits equal to SEK 491,950 through 163 transactions from September through December, while being declared as having annual income at the level of SEK 310,000. While Betsson argued that this person’s wealth could be explained by the previous gains from gambling, the regulator determined that the source of money in question hadn’t been verified at a satisfactory level.
The court agreed with this reasoning and stated that companies should perform thorough investigations of the origin of funds whenever AML violations are suspected, showing the readiness of Sweden to uphold its legacy of strict law enforcement in the field of AML.
