It seems that crime is constantly hitting the gaming industry and that’s simply a fact that cannot be denied. Various institutions are giving maximum effort to change things for the better but sometime things get out of control.
What Happened This Time?
In this story, the two main “bad guys” are two online licensees, Betway Ltd and Mandalorian Technologies. These two corporations allegedly repeatedly disobeyed rules concerning customer bonus offers.
Therefore, one of the leading and most important institutions in Sweden, Spelinspektionen, has come to the decision to punish them by issuing warnings and fines to these companies. According to some information, both of them have seriously broken these regulations more than once.
Namely, it is allowed to offer bonuses but only to first-time consumers, a detail they failed to comply with
Suffering The Consequences:
Betway was fine SEK5m which is around 520k US dollars, while the other company was fined with SEK9m, which is approximately more than 930k dollars. On a more positive note, these two have three weeks to decide whether they are going to do something about these forfeits or not.
Moreover, the Swedish regulator stated that they have been monitoring “some compliance” from the two licensees but they have also highlighted that “further measures must be taken to achieve full compliance” with these rules.
Generally speaking, Spelinspektionen is doing their best to make things right as far as this industry is concerned. In March, they have incorporated some changes when it comes to ads and now they are making sure that other companies from the gambling industry are carefully following rules and regulations.
How Did That Mission Go?
Even though many firms have accepted these changes concerning advertisements, many licensees from this country stated that this request regarding “moderation” in marketing is a little bit obscure and indistinctive and that they need some time to embrace and accept these modifications.
Not too long ago, the Swedish market research outfit, Sifo, uncovered that the 10 biggest locally licensed gaming corporations gave approximately SEK1.4b on ads during the first quarter of this year, which represents a 40% increase over the same period last year.
Cherry AB was the leader when it comes to this, because they’ve spent SEK317m, Kindred Group took second place with SEK313m, Svenska Spel ended up in third place with SEK217m, Global Gaming fourth with SEK101m, while ATG was fifth with SEK93m.
Source: “Sweden Fines Two Online Gambling Ops For Violating Bonus Rules” https://calvinayre.com/2019/05/16/business/sweden-penalizes-online-casinos-violating-bonus-rules/. Calvin Ayre. May 20, 2019.
