Sweden’s Administrative Court in Linköping has dismissed appeals from Betsson Nordic, Snabbare, and Spooniker against anti-money laundering fines issued by Spelinspektionen in May 2025, confirming penalties totalling SEK 22 million across three separate rulings handed down on 2 July 2026.
All three cases turned on the same core question: whether an operator can treat a customer’s deposit as safe on the basis that it resembles funds the customer previously withdrew. In near-identical wording across each judgment, the court ruled that an assumption that deposits consist of previous winnings is not an enhanced customer due-diligence measure, regardless of whether the same bank account was used for both deposits and withdrawals.
What Each Operator Argued
Betsson’s appeal centred on eight customers aged 20 to 29 who deposited between SEK 133,584 and SEK 491,950 over a matter of months. The company argued that Spelinspektionen’s reading of the rules exceeded what the money-laundering framework, prior case law, and EU-level guidance require, and asked for the SEK 6.5 million fee to be cancelled or cut substantially.
Snabbare’s case involved 10 customers who deposited between roughly SEK 950,000 and SEK 3.2 million each. The operator told the court it had run 139 manual checks across the group and filed a report with Sweden’s Financial Police, and argued that encouraging players to withdraw winnings rather than leave funds on account was itself a risk-reducing habit – an argument the court declined to accept as grounds to skip monitoring. The fine stood at SEK 5.5 million.
Spooniker’s exposure was the steepest at SEK 10 million. Its case involved five customers but was complicated by a prior warning for similar failings in 2022. The court used that history to characterise the new breaches as repeated rather than one-off, giving Spooniker no concession on the point it and the other two operators had contested most vigorously.
Where the Court Drew the Line
For Betsson and Snabbare, the court agreed the breaches were not systematic – citing the small number of customers reviewed as an insufficient basis for that characterisation – but found the breaches were serious, which was enough to uphold the fines in full. That partial concession changed nothing in the outcome. Spooniker received no equivalent relief given its prior enforcement history.
The three rulings collectively close off an argument the Swedish industry has tested for several years. Closed-loop payment patterns and a presumption that high-value deposits represent returned winnings have now been explicitly rejected as substitutes for enhanced due diligence by a court that applied the same reasoning in every case before it. Operators still relying on that logic to clear high-value depositors without requesting bank statements or equivalent verification face a clear evidential signal that the approach will not hold under scrutiny – a pattern visible in AML enforcement actions across other regulated markets as well.
Spelinspektionen announced the rulings on 3 July 2026, the day after they were handed down. Whether any of the three operators will pursue a further appeal has not been confirmed.
Source: European Gaming
Petra Vanhoof has spent the better part of a decade following the shifting tides of gambling regulation across Europe and beyond. She came up through the compliance side of the industry before pivoting to writing, which gives her a grounded, no-nonsense perspective on the rules, loopholes, and political maneuvering that shape how operators actually do business. She is particularly drawn to the gap between what regulators say and what the market ends up doing in response.