Key Points
- Swedish courts have now said twice that allowing players to pick “no limit” is against the law by making them breach Sweden’s mandatory deposit limit law.
- Penalties went from SEK79m to SEK44m because of a technicality about turnover, but bet365 still took a hit on every single warning and breach finding.
- The same review process that sank bet365 initially failed to get the better of state-owned Svenska Spel.
Jönköping Court Brings an End to Hillside’s Long, Three-Year Fight
For three long years, bet365’s Swedish operator had been arguing that “no limit” was the perfectly normal and legal way to handle deposit limits. On 8 October, the administration court of appeal in Jönköping finally disagreed, and slammed the doors shut on both Hillside appeals outright. Sweden’s gambling regulator dropped the judgement on 14 October.
The Button that Kept a Safety Net from Working
Sweden’s laws require every player to set an upper deposit limit for each day, week and month. From Jan 1st 2019 until April 18 2022, Hillside just let customers tick “no limit” instead. But secretly, bet365 had a hidden SEK500m cap sitting in the system. The problem was, customers had no way of seeing it.
Just how big was that hidden ceiling? In 2021, bet365’s gaming arm scooped a pretty penny, SEK 69 million, in gross gaming revenue, with sports betting reaching a whopping SEK 724.5 million. If you only look at gaming revenue, the cap was roughly 7.2 times bigger than what customers were seeing. As a safety net for a player losing cash, it was basically useless.
Hillside had claimed that the law only asked customers to choose a deposit limit, and “no limit” counted as a choice. But the regulator called that reading “shocking” for its complete lack of care for customers, and for basically turning a blind eye to operators’ responsibility to keep players safe. They took it even further, describing the opt-out as a serious and systematic breach of the gambling law.
Warning Messages Piled Up As Players Lost Even More
The issue wasn’t just the settings though, it was the real-life people on the other side of the screens. The investigators reviewed the 10 customers who lost the most cash between Oct 17 and Dec 17. Of those five, five of those accounts were looked into even more closely.
Every single one of those five showed serious signs of over-gambling. But you know what? Hillside mostly just sent automated messages, emails & reminders, the works. It took ages for any real human to have a look, and only then would any tighter controls come in, sometimes a whole month after the initial warnings went off.
One of those players shows just how fast the damage can build. With no deposit limit at all to hold them back, this one person made 44 deposits and 36 withdrawals between Oct 17 and Nov 27 2021, a total loss of SEK 287,623. Another customer had self-excluded more than once, and still bet with high deposit limits. But the regulator found that bet365 didn’t actually do anything to stop the player’s deposits between February 2019 and December 2021.
Chapter 14, Section 1 of the Gambling Act says licence holders are supposed to take action as soon as they see a player heading down a bad path. And let me tell you, the regulator’s verdict on this one was blunt: “It’s taken way too long for the two companies to take steps to stop players from continuing to gamble at their own risk.”
How SEK79 Million Became SEK44 Million?
At first, Spelinspektionen imposed SEK65 million and SEK14 million on bet365 in April 2023 for violating requirements for sports and for gaming services. Then in June 2024, the Administrative Court of Appeal in Linköping reduced the amounts to SEK40 million and SEK4 million with the same two warnings.
The reduction was based on a legal issue rather than on a different interpretation of the violation of the terms. In May 2023, the Supreme Administrative Court of Sweden decided that the cap on the turnover at 10% is net turnover. The company reported gross turnover of almost SEK2 billion for 2021.
In light of the new regulation, the authority itself offered lower fees of SEK52 million and SEK5 million. Linköping reduced the fees even further based on Hillside’s financial condition as well as aggravating and mitigating circumstances in this situation. Both the authority and the company appealed, and Jönköping made no changes to the previous decision.
Bet365 did achieve some success as it has now SEK35 million less to pay than it was originally ordered to. Still, Bet365 lost every allegation of breach and both warnings.
Defence of Hillside: Too Few Cases and Vague Regulations
Since the beginning, the company disputed the facts brought against it. In 2024, the operator referred to the global user base exceeding 90 million users. “If we focus only on individual shortcomings without putting them into the overall context, it risks making the supervision by the Swedish Gaming Authority arbitrary”, said the lawyers of bet365.
Neither court thought this argument was enough to reject the allegations. We contacted the operator and asked for comments about this decision but received no reply from it.
The operators did change their stance after the regulator became involved in the business. They removed the “No limit” option on 19 April 2022 and promised to monitor the players who lost SEK10,000 or more per month more closely.
An Operator Known to Swedish Courts
Judges in Sweden have met the operator before. In July 2021, the Court of Appeal of Sweden supported the imposition of SEK10 million on Hillside Sports for betting on the games where the majority of participants were under 18.
Another small case involved a friendly match between Kronängs IF and Mariedals IK on 28 March 2020 when 24 out of 34 listed players were minors. In May 2024, Jönköping kept that penalty at SEK400,000 after rejecting appeals from both sides.
Dutch Regulator Uncovers Similar Pattern
Across the North Sea, there’s a similar story unfolding. On 13 November 2025, the Dutch Gaming Authority (KSA) served up a formal warning to Hillside over their affordability checks. Some of the limits that Hillside had in place were so high that they allowed customers to deposit 103.12% of their monthly take-home pay, an absolute no-go under the Dutch gaming rules which recommend a limit of just 30% of a player’s monthly income.
The KSA also had a problem with Hillside relying on income questionnaires filled in by customers to determine how much they could afford to gamble, rather than using more verifiable documents as a basis. Hillside had a go at disputing this, but on 4 August 2026 the KSA came back and ruled that Hillside had no leg to stand on. Of course Hillside still has the option of taking the matter to court in the Netherlands.
Coincidence, or Something More? The Story of Svenska Spel
You probably won’t have read much in the papers about the Hillside case, but one thing that does get mentioned, albeit only briefly, is that the Swedish Gaming Inspectorate were looking at state-owned Svenska Spel around the same time and slapped it with a SEK100 million fine back in March 2024. The Linkoping court then overturned that fine in June 2025, despite agreeing that some customers of Svenska Spel had certainly been recklessly gambling.
Now, while the two cases aren’t identical, they share some similarities. For instance, both Hillside and Svenska Spel were taken to task over the same two-month period. But the reason for the fine is different in each case. Hillside broke the rules on deposit limits, while Svenska Spel was charged with failing to carry out its duty of care.
Expert View: Was it the Right Decision and is it Time to Rethink How Sweden Monitors Problem Gamblers?
We think the “no limit” button was a recipe for disaster from the moment it was launched. A mandatory limit that a customer can choose to switch off isn’t really a limit at all, and Swedish law never suggested that it was. What’s more, a cap that is seven times bigger than a year’s worth of gaming revenue is clearly not a safeguard for problem gamblers.
We are also running out of patience with the “sample size” defence. Ten accounts were never intended to be a representative sample of 90 million customers. They were chosen because they lost the most money, which is exactly the kind of customer that problem gambling monitoring should be focused on.
Many readers will call SEK44 million a slap on the wrist for three years of switched-off limits. We can’t agree, because the fine was reduced by a mathematical formula rather than any doubts about Hillside’s conduct.
But the bigger question is, what about Svenska Spel? The deposit limit breach alone sets the two cases apart, so we aren’t saying that Sweden has a special rule for its state-owned operator. But the regulator said that Svenska Spel also relied mainly on warnings and information messages to try and curb problem gambling. If the appeal court ultimately decides in Svenska Spel’s favour, private operators will be bound to ask why similar interventions produced such different outcomes. Our view is simple: duty of care should mean the same thing for every licensed operator in Sweden.
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