The Spelinspektionen, the Swedish Gaming Authority, has issued a warning and a penalty fee of SEK 9m ($810,000) to Videoslots due to failures in money laundering and financing terrorism.
Videoslots was first given its licence to operate in Sweden on 4 December 2018, but an investigation was launched on 2 November 2021 to check that the operator was complying with the Money Laundering Act.
The Spelinspektionen requested details regarding ‘Customer One’, a player who had joined the site on 1 January 2019 who had deposited around SEK 5.5m over the year, over 1,800 sessions, as well as frequent withdrawals.
After the customer could not prove how they were funding their gambling, the account was suspended on 1 August 2019 and a report was sent to the Videoslots Money Laundering Reporting Officer.
However, Videoslots re-opened to account on 20 August 2019 for 'business decisions' and following an internal investigation, deemed there was no need for tracking the account for anti-money laundering (AML) activities.
A second case was found with 'Customer Two', who had deposited SEK 3.9m across two years, but Videoslots had not investigated the issue.
Instead, the official report from Videoslots said: “Still no clear info about his possible occupation, all we know is that he is on the Board of a cleaning company and that he may earn more than the average income in his area, which is on SEK 294,000 per year.”
'Customer Three' made deposits up to SEK 600,000 over 12 days and Videoslots found that the customer had been prosecuted in the past, but only placed the account on monthly monitoring.
A year later, Videoslots checked the customer's income and found that they had earned SEK 215,228 from their official job that year.
A total of 10 customer experiences were detailed in the report by the Spelinspektionen.
As the Spelinspektionen cannot accurately base the penalty fee off the revenue Videoslots has made, the Authority has taken the maximum penalty fee of SEK 11.8m and lowered it to SEK 9m based on what they do know about the financial position of the company.
Only two days ago, the Spelinspektionen published its interim report on efforts to reduce illegal gambling in the country.
