Bet365 loses Swedish appeal over “no limit” deposit option

The basic point is almost offensively simple. Swedish rules required customers to set a specific numerical deposit limit. Bet365 let customers choose “no limit” instead. The Court of Appeal agreed with the Administrative Court’s earlier assessment that Hillside (Gaming) ENC and Hillside (Sports) ENC had committed serious violations.

The penalties were split in the same way as the business. The sports betting operation was fined SEK40m, while the igaming arm received a further SEK4m. Focus Gaming News reported that regulators said customers were able to select the “no limit” setting during the period under review, and that an undisclosed technical ceiling of SEK500m existed in the system. Spelinspektionen’s view, upheld on appeal, was that this still did not meet the legal requirement for a specific deposit cap.

That distinction matters because these rules are not really about what sits buried in a platform’s architecture. They are about forcing a visible act of restraint at the moment a customer sets spending controls. A hidden ceiling may exist as a systems parameter; it is not the same thing as asking a person to choose an actual number and live with it.

The regulator had already described the shortcomings as serious and systematic, and the appeal court did not disturb that. For operators tempted to treat limit-setting as a design problem rather than a compliance obligation, that is the useful part of the ruling. The issue was not whether some ultimate maximum could be found somewhere in the machinery. It was whether the customer set a specific limit. On these facts, the answer was no.

Bet365 did, however, avoid losing its Swedish licences. Spelinspektionen issued a warning instead, citing remedial measures introduced during and after the investigation. Those included manual reviews of customers with monthly losses above SEK10,000, added monitoring for higher-risk groups such as players aged 18 to 24 and people returning after self-excluding, and action to suspend or restrict accounts when internal indicators showed heightened risk.

That leaves the case looking less like a morality play than a familiar piece of modern regulation: punish the old conduct, preserve the licence, and give weight to systems that make the operator easier to supervise going forward. The original proposed sanctions had been higher—SEK65m and SEK14m—but were reduced in light of co-operation, corrective steps and the statutory cap that prevents fines exceeding 10 per cent of annual turnover.

The hidden SEK500m threshold is still the detail that makes the case hard to dress up as a mere technical dispute. Focus Gaming News noted that bet365’s Swedish sports betting gross gaming revenue in 2021 was SEK724.5m. Against that scale, the notion of a deposit “limit” set so high and kept out of view helps explain why the court was unmoved.