ANJ Fines Anonymous Operator €500,000 for Missing Out on 29 Risky Gamblers

Key Points

• French ANJ levied a fine of €500,000 against an unnamed operator because of the improper classification of 29 risky gamblers between October 2023 and March 2024.
• The losses of the 29 risky gamblers amounted to €683,355 in that period, while the operator made profits of €190,501.86 from those gamblers.
• The sanctions commission confirmed that detecting risky players and intervening with them are two separate, independently enforceable legal duties, meaning the operator could not use partial compliance as a shield.

Regulator Pulls €500,000 Trigger on Player Protection Failures

French gambling regulator Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ) has slapped a fine of €500,000 ($572,797) on an anonymous internet-based betting provider for failing to detect and help its customers exhibiting problem gambling. Company X, as it is referred to in the regulatory proceedings, was found responsible for the mismanagement of 29 out of 30 most vulnerable customers identified by ANJ for review.

Of these, six users were completely unidentified as high-risk customers, while 23 customers were assigned to risk categories that do not reflect the true level of their risky behaviour. The period covered by the case stretches from 1 October 2023 to 31 March 2024, and the sanctions commission’s decision was made on 10 July 2026.

29 Players, €683,000 in Losses, and One Very Inconvenient Data Vault

The investigation centred on Company X’s “coffre-fort,” a secured data vault where player account records are stored. The ANJ used the multiple indicator rating model, taking into account frequency of deposits, betting intensity, loss patterns, and self-exclusion experience, to score each account according to its risk factor.

On the basis of this analysis, the investigators identified 30 accounts, the players of which were considered to have the highest risk factors, and investigated 29 out of these.

The total amount of losses for 29 accounts came up to €683,355, while Company X made gains totalling €190,501.86 out of these same players.

Beyond misclassification, the operator also fell short on intervention. The commission found it did not put sufficiently graduated or proportionate support measures in place for 25 of the 29 players, a failure the regulator treated as a separate and independently sanctionable breach. Automated warning emails were sent, promotional restrictions applied, and some accounts were temporarily suspended for fraud-related reasons, all of which Company X claimed should count as adequate responses. The commission disagreed.

It also noted that some of those same high-risk customers were still receiving bonuses during the review period, an arrangement the commission said could actively encourage continued gambling rather than moderate it.

The Legal Framework Company X Said Did Not Exist

Company X’s primary defence was direct: French law, it argued, does not provide a statutory definition of “excessive” or “pathological” gambling, which it said rendered the entire obligation vague and unenforceable. The commission rejected that argument without qualification.

The decision hinges upon two statutes that include the gambling rule from 12 May 2010 and the Code de la sécurité intérieure. Both of these statutes require that the licensed online operators be capable of detecting any signs of problematic gambling and help persons in need. In addition to those statutes, there is a ministerial cadre de référence of 9 April 2021, which is not binding but highly authoritative.

It contains certain signs that the operators should track, such as the frequency of bets, loss chasing, modification of voluntary limits, use of multiple accounts, and time spent gambling. The framework’s flexibility, it added, does not mean operators can pick and choose which indicators to apply. Operators are legally required to demonstrate they have made “all necessary efforts” to comply, using the recommended indicators as a starting point and supplementing them with any additional relevant data.

Company X also challenged specific indicators used in the scoring model, particularly the counting of “completed bets” and the treatment of voluntary spending limits when an account is reopened after a prior closure. Both challenges were dismissed.

The commission further confirmed that pre-inspection data, such as voluntary self-exclusions registered before the review window opened, could legitimately inform a player’s risk classification within the period under scrutiny.

Two Duties, Not One: The Commission’s Sharpest Finding

The ruling’s most significant legal point was the commission’s insistence that identification and accompaniment are two separate, independently enforceable obligations. An operator cannot compensate for failing to intervene with a player simply by arguing it correctly classified that player, and vice versa.

That framing has practical consequences for every licensed operator in France. A strong detection algorithm does not satisfy the duty to act once harmful behaviour is spotted. Equally, a responsive support programme cannot offset a failure to identify who needs it in the first place. The commission’s findings make both arms of the obligation simultaneously mandatory, not sequential.

Company X pointed to post-inspection remedial work, including an upgraded detection system, an expanded player-protection team, and internal data showing a 28% average reduction in customer net losses over a 90-day before-and-after window. The commission took note of those changes but found the earlier failures serious enough in their gravity and duration to justify the fine regardless.

A Fine with Prior History

This is not Company X’s first run-in with the ANJ. However, in 2024, the company got a penalty for exceeding the statutory payout ceiling rate for 2022. The commission decided not to consider this previous penalty as a factor aggravating the current case because, according to its decision, the penalties were legally different from each other, and thus the amount of the fine should not be increased.

The activities of ANJ have been increasing on different fronts. Thus, in January 2025, the agency fined SPS Betting, which runs the Unibet brand in France, with €800,000 due to the discovery of numerous flaws in the self-exclusion mechanism. Another operator that remains anonymous got fined €75,000 in July 2025 for the continuous violation of data archiving regulations.

The Algorithm Already Running Circles Around Operators

The timing of this ruling sits against a significant regulatory development. In May 2026, the ANJ unveiled a newly developed algorithm designed to identify substantially more likely problem gamblers than those currently flagged by operator systems. Built using 23 indicators drawn from scientific literature and validated against the internationally recognised Canadian Problem Gambling Index, the tool classified approximately 600,000 online players as having a “high probability” of excessive gambling during the second half of 2025, around 8.7% of the licensed online population supervised by the ANJ.

Of those 600,000, approximately 300,000 were classified as manifestly excessive gamblers. ANJ president Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin called the tool “a decisive step for the regulator” and made clear that identifying those 300,000 players should now be a matter of immediate priority for all licensed operators.

The scale of that figure set against the industry’s own numbers tells the story plainly. According to the ANJ’s April 2026 review of prevention action plans, operators identified 89,000 excessive players in 2025, up from 31,000 in 2024. Progress, the regulator acknowledged, but roughly one-seventh of what its own algorithm found. The ANJ described the ongoing gap between operator reports and its own data as “inconsistent” with both the size of operator player bases and the results of population-level prevalence studies.

The French gambling market reported gross gambling revenue (GGR) of €14.1 billion in 2025, an increase of 3% compared to the previous year. The observation by the algorithm that those labelled as having high-risk behaviours make up about 60% of the total GGR from online casinos, with that percentage growing every year since 2023, forms the crux of the ANJ’s strategic plan of 2024-26.

The operator has a two-month window to lodge an administrative appeal with the relevant courts.

Expert Analysis

This ruling is not simply about one operator’s data hygiene. The commission’s decision to treat detection and intervention as parallel, independent duties rather than sequential steps is a structural shift in how compliance exposure works. An operator with a sophisticated risk model but a passive support function faces the same legal jeopardy as one that fails to spot the problem in the first place. Add the ANJ’s own algorithm now running as an external benchmark against which operator performance can be cross-checked, and the compliance margin for France’s licensed online sector has narrowed considerably. The fine is €500,000. The precedent may cost more.