On 28 October 2026, iGaming Business reported that the Swedish Trade Association for Online Gambling (BOS) has urged Spelinspektionen, the Swedish Gambling Authority, to rethink how it supervises anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance. The call rests on a report BOS commissioned from the law firm Nordic Legal. The report's publication date has not been stated.
Every reported figure below comes from that single outlet, and no second independent source has confirmed any of it.
According to iGaming Business, Nordic Legal compared Spelinspektionen with the Financial Supervisory Authority (FI), the Stockholm County Administrative Board and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. The firm reportedly examined 12 AML-related Spelinspektionen decisions issued since 2021. In 11 of them, the report says, the authority relied primarily on reviewing small samples of five to 15 customer files.
The report also looked at the size of penalties. It reviewed nine AML decisions from 2022 to 2025, and in seven of them the sanction was at or above 50% of the statutory maximum, according to the outlet. Two of those reached approximately 91% and 100%. For comparison, the report puts FI's AML sanctions in large banking cases at roughly 20% to 27% of FI's maximum.
Seven of nine means that about 78% of the reviewed decisions carried sanctions at or above half the statutory maximum.
BOS secretary general Gustaf Hoffstedt said the gambling authority is more heavy-handed and less focused on dialogue than other Swedish authorities, iGaming Business reported.
Earlier in October 2026, according to the same outlet, Spelinspektionen imposed SEK4 million ($401,010) on the gaming arm of Hillside Group and SEK40 million on its sports betting business. iGaming Business did not report the grounds for either penalty.
Spelinspektionen declined to comment on the report when iGaming Business approached it.
Several questions remain open. The report, as described, does not give the statutory maximums in kronor, so the percentages cannot be converted into actual amounts or compared in absolute terms with FI's banking fines. It also does not say whether FI's ceiling is calculated the same way as Spelinspektionen's, and that matters for any percentage-to-percentage comparison. Whether samples of five to 15 files are unusual is unclear too, because the sampling practices of the three comparison authorities are not described. The full Nordic Legal report would settle these points, provided it includes a decision-by-decision table and the comparators' methods.
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