Gambling watchdog in Sweden gets dressing down from government watchdog
The Spelinspektionen, or Swedish Gambling Authority, has been hit with criticism from the Justice Ombudsman (JO) over the self-exclusion system for gambling.
In recent months, the gambling industry worldwide has been taking better care of how it presents safety for gamblers. That includes some companies and countries improving their monitoring or self-exclusionary programs. In March, American lawmakers attempted to bring a new SAFE Bet Act to Congress, and in the UK last year, its six-year-old program GAMSTOP has now hit over half a million users.
The criticism being levied at the Spelinspektionen is that its own prevention program, Spelpaus.se, didn’t include a method for manual shutdowns. As described on the website:
“The system was built up based on the basic idea that Spelinspektionen would not handle any shutdowns manually.
“The service was thus designed so that the player enters the website Spelpaus.se and confirms suspension with e-identification.
“Until the summer of 2024, it was not possible to suspend yourself from gambling without e-identification.”
Digital IDs were introduced in Sweden in 2003, but they’re not a mandatory thing to have. As such, users who came to the website until 2024 would have found that they couldn’t exclude themselves, as they didn’t have the correct ID.
Digital ID causes headaches for Sweden based gamblers
The watchdog has possibly failed to prevent multiple gambling addicts who had come to the site looking for reprieve. This is exactly what happened in the summer, 2024, when it was brought to the Parliamentary Ombudsmen’s attention through a notification.
Due to this, the request took “about a month” to complete.
In response, Spelinspektionen has now added a solution to include manual shutdowns and has acknowledged that it had failed to address the situation:
“The Swedish Gambling Authority does not notice that there was no alternative to suspension when the person made his request and that the information about why the processing was delayed should have been better.”
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