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The Swedish Trade Association for Online Gambling (BOS) has written a letter to the Ministry of Finance to ask them to amend the Gambling Act to close a loophole that allows unlicensed operators and suppliers to accept Swedish customers.
The Gambling Licence Investigation, which predated the Swedish re-regulation in 2019, wanted to outlaw operators that did not have a Swedish licence but accepted Swedish customers.
Signed by secretary general Gustaf Hoffstedt, the BOS writes in an open letter that “the scope of application of the law was changed by the Government Offices in the bill that led to the Gambling Act. With the original Gambling Licence Investigation’s proposal, the application of any gambling for money that takes from Sweden and is subject to licence requirements had a broader scope.”
The final text, however, de facto allowed unlicensed gambling companies “to accept Swedish gambling consumers as long as the companies avoid using the Swedish language and Swedish currency”.
Hoffstedt cites the widespread use of English and understanding of the euro as reasons why consumers are not at all deterred by this.
On behalf of the BOS, he also writes that Sweden’s targeted channelisation rates of 90 percent at the time of re-regulation has still not been reached.
He said that it is not because such success rates are impossible, but because gambling with unlicensed operators has not been made difficult enough to dissuade customers.
Although the BOS has been lobbying for such a change for years, Hoffstedt acknowledged to Vixio GamblingCompliance that the “Zimpler ruling highlights the problem".
He was referring to last week's ruling from Sweden’s Court of Appeals against the Swedish Gambling Authority (SGA) in favour of payments platform Zimpler, which the SGA had ordered to stop providing services to unlicensed operators.
The court openly acknowledged that Zimpler had provided payment services to operators who were not licensed by Sweden, but that “the Gambling Act and its preparatory work lack specificity regarding what is required from a gambling company to be considered to be aimed at Sweden".
"Already in this respect, it finds that there were no prerequisites for the Swedish Gambling Authority to formulate the current injunction against Zimpler," he said.
