France’s gambling regulator has fined SPS Betting (Unibet France) €800,000 for a significant breach of responsible gambling regulations.
The fine is the largest to be issued to date by the National Gaming Authority (ANJ) and relates to failures in the self-exclusion system at Unibet.fr, which is now owned by French gaming operator La Française des Jeux (FDJ) after its October 2024 acquisition of Kindred Group.
The self-exclusion failure, which was first discovered in 2021, resulted in players being excluded from gambling for a shorter period of time than they had requested.
This was due to an error in the system which converted months to days, meaning that a player who requested a 12-month exclusion was actually only excluded for 12 days.
According to the ANJ, the system error first occurred between March 2021 and December 2022 before being corrected. However, an update to the system caused the error to reappear between December 2022 and February 2023, potentially affecting thousands of players.
As a result of the repeated and serious infraction of the rules, ANJ has ordered SPS Betting to pay a fine of €800,000. The operator must also post a prominent notice on the homepage of Unibet.fr for a period of two weeks from 17 March, notifying customers of this sanction.
The fine will also be published in the Official Journal of France, as well as on the website of the ANJ, until March 2026, at which time it will be anonymised to remove references to the operator and brand.
SPS Betting had two months in which to appeal the decision to the Council of State.