France’s National Gambling Authority (ANJ) recently reported that it has imposed a €500,000 fine on a licensed online gambling operator. The fine was required after the regulator found failures to identify and adequately support players who displayed signs of excessive gambling.
The sanction was adopted on July 10, 2026, after a hearing on June 30. It marks one of the regulator’s most severe enforcement actions regarding responsible gambling and underscores the ANJ’s stance that player protection remains crucial to gambling regulation.
Investigation Focused on High-Risk Players
ANJ’s decision was based on an administrative investigation of the operator’s compliance with its legal obligations to monitor and detect at-risk gamblers between October 1, 2023, and March 31, 2024.
As part of the investigation, the French online casino watchdog analysed data in the operator’s ”coffre-fort” database, which essentially records every iGaming transaction. The regulator then reviewed the gambling behaviour of 30 players identified as presenting the highest apparent risk of excessive or pathological gambling.
To identify high-risk customers, the regulator relied on seven behavioural indicators which are included in France’s responsible gambling framework:
- Frequency of deposits made.
- Repeated account top-ups that were then lost.
- Gambling activity frequency.
- Unusually high betting activity.
- Repeated changes to the legally required gambling limits.
- Use of the operator’s self-exclusion tools.
- Signing up for multiple gambling accounts with the operator.
Failures to Identify and Support Players
After the investigation, the Sanctions Commission came to the conclusion that the operator failed to properly identify 29 of the 30 players reviewed.
It was reported that six players were not identified as being at risk at all, while 23 others were assigned risk levels below what their gambling behaviour warranted. The Commission also found that 25 of those players did not receive sufficiently robust interventions.
Alarmingly, some users had no responsible gaming measures, while others received only automated warning emails without additional support. In other instances, the platform reduced promo offers but continued to award bonuses to high-risk bettors.
According to the Commission, these measures are considered insufficient and cannot properly reduce harmful gambling behaviour. During the review period, 24 of the 30 players continued receiving bonuses and other incentives worth around €44,000, despite being marked as elevated-risk profiles.
The Commission explained and warned operators that simply sending automated emails cannot, on its own, provide adequate support for players who show signs of excessive or pathological gambling.
Operator Disputes Regulator’s Methodology
However, the operator did not agree to the legal interpretation of this obligation and the ANJ’s methodology for identifying problem gamblers.
It argued that French law does not specifically define excessive or pathological gambling and challenged several of the indicators used by investigators, such as the treatment of modified bets and changes to player-imposed limits.
The company in question also insisted that it had implemented appropriate phased interventions and recorded that losses among the affected players fell by an average of 28% in the 90 days after the interventions.
It also highlighted that before that, it identified and supported over 5,100 at-risk consumers with approximately 1.78 million active player accounts. Therefore, it believes that the sample examined by the ANJ is not enough proof of a systemic failure.
Commission Rejects Claims of Structural Failures
While upholding the alleged breaches by the online casino, the Commission declined to endorse one of the regulator’s broader conclusions.
The regulator had argued that the findings demonstrated a structural failure in the operator’s responsible gambling policies. However, the Commission believes that examining only the 30 highest-scoring players was not enough to establish that the company had major deficiencies.
However, it noted that the operator had failed in relation to the 29 identified players, and that the available evidence did not prove that its overall responsible gambling framework was structurally flawed.
€500,000 Penalty Remains
To determine the proper sanction, the Commission considered the seriousness, duration and impact of the discovered breaches.
The misconduct lasted six months and contributed to player losses of €683,355, while the operator generated approximately €190,500 in net revenue from the affected players during the same period.
It was remarked that the operator had subsequently upgraded its responsible gambling algorithm and expanded its player protection team, but the Commission held that these corrective actions do not reduce the seriousness of the earlier failures.
Therefore, the Commission ultimately imposed a €500,000 financial penalty but declined the ANJ’s request to publish an additional publicity measure beyond the mandatory publication of the decision on the regulator's website.
Important Clarification for Licensed Casino Operators
The decision also provides important regulatory guidance by confirming that an operator’s obligations to identify and support problem gamblers are separate legal duties.
According to the Commission, an operator may be penalised solely for failing to correctly identify a player as high-risk, even if no breach is found regarding the support measures provided to that player.
The ruling reinforces the ANJ’s increasingly proactive approach to responsible gambling enforcement and signals that operators are expected not only to deploy detection tools but also to ensure that those tools accurately assess player risk and trigger proportional interventions.
