Does a fine at 100% of the legal maximum prove the regulator is doing its job?
Sweden’s online gambling trade body says no, and it has commissioned a lawyer’s report to make the case. BOS, the Swedish Trade Association for Online Gambling, argues that Spelinspektionen, the country’s gambling regulator, is more sanction-heavy and less inclined to dialogue than comparable Swedish authorities. That complaint sits at the centre of a wider argument about gambling advertising regulation and compliance supervision: how hard a state can lean on licensed operators before enforcement stops improving behaviour and starts simply raising the cost of holding a licence.
The report was written by law firm Nordic Legal, which BOS says acted independently despite being the client. According to iGaming Business’s reporting on the findings, it compares Spelinspektionen’s supervisory approach with that of the Financial Supervisory Authority (FI), the Stockholm County Administrative Board and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate across three areas: anti-money-laundering (AML) oversight, the use and size of sanction fees, and assessments of whether owners and senior managers are suitable. Anyone writing about the detail should go back to that original coverage and the report itself; the figures below come from it.
The complaint is about method, not only severity
The sharpest finding is not that Spelinspektionen fines people. It is what the fines are built on. Nordic Legal looked at 12 AML-related decisions issued since 2021 and found that 11 rested primarily on reviews of small samples of customer files, between five and 15 per case. The regulator frequently left the operator’s overall risk assessment, policies and control procedures outside the scope of the review altogether.
FI and the Stockholm County Administrative Board, on the report’s account, work the other way round. They examine the system first, the entity’s risk assessment, written procedures and internal controls, then pull customer files as samples to test whether those systems actually function. The file review is evidence about the system. In the gambling regulator’s AML cases, per the report, the file review is largely the case.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A firm with a sound AML framework can still produce ten weak customer files out of several hundred thousand accounts. A firm with no framework at all might, on a lucky draw, produce ten clean ones. If supervision does not look at the machinery, it cannot easily tell those two firms apart, and the operator has no clear instruction on what to fix.
The number and the term that qualifies it
Then there are the sanction amounts. Nordic Legal measured penalties as a share of each authority’s statutory maximum rather than in kronor, which is the only way to compare bodies with different fee ceilings supervising entities of wildly different sizes. Of nine Spelinspektionen AML decisions reviewed between 2022 and 2025, seven landed at or above 50% of the legal maximum, with two reaching roughly 91% and 100%. FI’s AML sanctions in large banking cases came in at around 20% to 27% of its maximum. The county board’s fees were usually a smaller fraction still, with occasional heavier penalties for serious breaches.
| Authority | AML supervision approach (per the report) | Sanctions as share of legal maximum |
|---|---|---|
| Spelinspektionen | Sample-based, customer-case driven; risk assessment and policies often excluded | 7 of 9 cases at or above 50%; two at ~91% and 100% |
| Financial Supervisory Authority (FI) | System-level, risk-based; files sampled to test controls | Roughly 20–27% in large banking cases |
| Stockholm County Administrative Board | System-level, risk-based; files sampled to test controls | Usually a smaller fraction, with occasional higher penalties |
A headline figure of “100% of the maximum” reads as a regulator at full stretch. The qualifier is that the maximum is a statutory ceiling calibrated to turnover, not a measure of how serious this particular breach was, and that the evidence base beneath several of those decisions was a handful of customer files. BOS’s position, in effect, is that the penalty scale and the investigative scale are out of proportion with each other.
What BOS is asking for
Secretary general Gustaf Hoffstedt frames the ask in terms of administrative convergence rather than leniency. He told iGB that Spelinspektionen deviates from “the standards and procedures that typically characterise Swedish public authorities”, that in BOS’s view the authority is “more heavy-handed and less focused on dialogue or collaborative problem-solving compared to other Swedish authorities”, and that the licensed market “would benefit if the Swedish Gambling Authority were to adopt working methods more closely aligned with those of other Swedish government agencies”.
Read practically, that means three things: system-level AML reviews instead of file-sampling, sanction fees proportioned the way financial supervision proportions them, and a supervisory relationship with more dialogue in it before enforcement starts. Nothing in the reporting suggests BOS is asking for the AML obligations themselves to be loosened. The argument is about how compliance is tested and priced.
Why Sweden’s regulator holds a hard line
The source reporting does not include a Spelinspektionen response, so the regulator’s answer to this specific report is not yet on the record. Its statutory mandate, though, is not in dispute. Sweden re-regulated its market in 2019 around a channelisation goal: pull players out of unlicensed sites and into a licensed market where consumer protection, a duty of care toward players and AML duties all apply. Gambling accounts move money quickly, in small units, across borders, which is precisely the profile financial crime supervisors worry about. Problem gambling adds a second rationale: an operator that fails to notice unusual deposit patterns is often failing two duties at once, the AML one and the duty of care.
There is also a deterrence logic behind large fees. If a penalty is smaller than the revenue from lax onboarding, it is a cost of doing business. Whether a sanction near the ceiling is deterrence or overreach depends almost entirely on how robustly the underlying breach was established, which is the point the report attacks. And courts have not been uniformly sympathetic to operators: the Jönköping Court of Appeal rejected appeals from both bet365 and the Swedish Gambling Authority over a 2021 penalty against the operator, leaving the sanction standing. Reported fine figures in the bet365 litigation differ between sources and between stages of the case, so the exact amount is best taken from the court’s own decision rather than from secondary coverage.
Where gambling advertising regulation fits into the same argument
Marketing rules are the other half of the compliance load Swedish licensees carry, and they follow the same philosophy. The Gambling Act requires gambling marketing to be moderate, a standard applied case by case rather than through a fixed list of banned words. Bonus offers may only be made at the first occasion of play, which rules out the rolling reload-and-free-bet cycle common elsewhere. Operators must offer deposit and loss limits, and the national self-exclusion register, Spelpaus, blocks marketing to anyone who has signed up.
Regulators elsewhere scrutinise gambling ads for the obvious reason: promotional messaging reaches people who cannot safely act on it, including those already in trouble, and “risk-free” style framing misdescribes the product. Every licensed game carries a house edge, every bonus carries wagering terms, and advertising compresses both out of view. Restrictions on bonus advertising are, at bottom, an attempt to stop the compression. That is a defensible aim even when the drafting is clumsy, and the clumsiness is a fair thing for operators to argue about.
The American version of the same quarrel
Sweden argues with one regulator. US operators argue with dozens. Advertising rules for sports betting sit with individual state gaming commissions, so the same campaign can be compliant in one state and actionable across a border. States have pushed back on “risk-free” and “free bet” promotional language as misleading, constrained sportsbook marketing partnerships with universities, mandated helpline and responsible-gambling messaging in specified formats, and set rules on who may appear in ads. The industry’s own Responsible Marketing Code adds a self-regulatory layer, including not targeting anyone under 21.
The parallel is not exact. Sweden’s dispute concerns the supervisory method of a single national authority with licence conditions attached; the US version is a patchwork where the friction comes from inconsistency rather than intensity. What travels across both is the underlying question: whether aggressive enforcement is correcting real consumer harm or mostly generating compliance work. US states debating stricter ad limits will eventually face Sweden’s problem, which is that strict rules only bite if the supervision behind them is methodologically sound.
What happens next is genuinely open
A commissioned report is a lobbying instrument, not a legal process. It has no binding effect on Spelinspektionen, and the plausible outcomes range from the regulator quietly adjusting its review scope, to a government or parliamentary look at supervisory practice, to nothing at all. Operators can still contest individual decisions in court, though the recent appeals court ruling suggests that route is not a soft one.
The durable signal is narrower and more useful than “regulation is tightening”. It is that the next phase of this argument is about evidence standards, not about whether gambling should be policed. Operators who want proportionate sanctions will have to show they have the system-level controls that proportionate sanctions presuppose. Players, meanwhile, should treat deposit limits and self-exclusion tools as the practical protections they are, whatever the regulators conclude about each other’s working methods.