Swedish Gambling Regulator to Ban Excessive Advertising

Spelinspektionen, a Swedish national gambling regulator, announced their new plans to stand in the way of excessive advertising in the newly regulated market.

How to Control the Market?

The regulatory body will cooperate with Konsumentverket, a Swedish consumer agency, in order to have better control over gambling ments.

Still, the regulator hasn’t really made a thorough analysis of how much advertising should be considered excessive, but they plan on defining it in the near future.

Spelinspektionen advises all licensed Swedish operators to Konsumentverket that will further guide them and make sure they are not advertising excessively.

Potential Punishments

The regulator also said that they plan on also imposing backward sanctions on all those operators that have violated the rules in the past.

They could potentially have to deal with only a warning, but could also get a financial penalty…

…or even a complete revocation of their license to operate in Sweden.

“A violation of the requirement of moderation is typically considered to be serious. The sanction that may be applicable in an individual case depends on several different factors, such as how long the infringement has been going on,” Spelinspektionen officials said.

Working with Konsumentverket

Since Sweden launched a newly-regulated gambling market on January 1 of this year, Spelinspektionen started working together with Konsumentverket…

…because it was necessary to have better control over the market.

The two national regulatory bodies had to split their operation and also formalize the methods of information exchange and consultation between them.

The consumer agency has the duty of overseeing the areas of moderate marketing, directing advertising to self-excluded customers, collecting information relating to players’ ages and from the problem gambling helpline, as well as overseeing lottery advertising.

“The clarity we achieve with the agreement benefits the supervision as we ensure that important issues do not end up between the two entities,” Spelinspektionen operations chief, Patrik Gustavsson, explained.

“Regardless of whether the consumers turn to the Konsumentverket or the Spelinspektionen with tips or notifications, they know that the case ends up right,“ Andreas Prochazka, head of a unit at the Konsumentverket, added.

More Warnings

Just recently, Spelinspektionen has given out a series of warnings to all licensed operators that haven’t been respecting their new regulations. The Swedish gambling regulator wants to make sure that all operators in the country are compliant with the rules.

If they still fail to respect them, as well as self-exclusion rules and other issues…

…Spelinspektionen will be forced to penalize them, or even worse, completely ban them from the market.

“In recent days we have investigated what this is due to, and have found that everything seems to work well with the system. But for some reason, there are a handful of gaming companies that do not meet the requirements set out by law,” Communications manager for the regulator, Anders Sims, commented.

Source:

“Swedish regulator to crack down on excessive advertising”, igamingbusiness.com, March 18, 2019.