SGA fines Aspire Gloabl £250k
The Swedish Gambling Authority (SGA) has fined AG Communications LTD, a subsidiary of Aspire Global, £247,000 for self-exclusion failures.
Aspire Global was fined due to self-exclusion failures that took place in January. © Pixabay.
The SGA found that AG Communications had not connected to Sweden’s national self-exclusion database, Spelpaus.se. Operators with a Swedish licence were required to be connected to the register from 1 January. Aspire Global said in a statement that a failure from a third-party led to the issue.
The operator was forced to manually check whether any excluded players had accessed its service every ten minutes, issuing refunds to those found to have gained access. The operator closed its Swedish sites on 8 January, before finally connecting successfully to Spelpaus on 15 January.
Despite these efforts, 34 self-excluded players were able to continue gambling. Aspire said that this was due to differences between referenced national social security numbers. Due to this, the SGA has fined Aspire SEK3m (£247,000).
The SGA wrote to a number of operators over similar failings, in what was at the time somewhat of a scandal. Alongside Aspire Global, Genesis Global, Betsson, bwin and more operators were formally warned.
ATG and Svenska Spel lead the way in Q1
Two operators are leading the charge considerably in Sweden in the first quarter of the year. ATG’s revenues of SEK1067.6m (£88.1m) gave it a 31% share of the market, according to data from Redeye.
Svenska Spel came in second with revenues of SEK572.9m (£47.3m) and Kindred third with SEK349.4m (£28.8m). Between them, these three operators accounted for over 46% of the market share for Q1 in Sweden.
Operators also will have new marketing standards to follow in Sweden. Last month, the SGA released guidelines to reduce their advertising as public and political pressure continues to mount of the advertising practices of the industry.
Those guidelines were played down by Minister for Civil Affairs, Ardalan Shekarabi, who is leading the charge against operators. He has said that government will intervene should the industry prove unable to self-regulate its marketing and advertising practices.
