Court orders online casino to repay gambler €200,000 in losses over licensing issue
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The Overijssel court ordered the online casino Bwin to reimburse a Dutch gambler all the money he lost there over a two-year period. The company did not have a license in the Netherlands, and the court ruled that this made the contract concluded with the gambler invalid.
The man had lost over 187,000 euros. Bwin also has to cover his legal costs and pay interest on the amount, bringing the total closer to 200,000 euros.
The man gambled at the Malta-based online casino from January 2018 to November 2019, when online gambling was still illegal in the Netherlands. He only stopped when his spouse discovered by chance how much money he had lost, his lawyer said. The lawyer argued that Bwin did nothing to slow the man’s gambling behavior despite his “clear signs” of addiction.
Bwin agreed that it had operated without a license but argued that this did not void the agreement made with the gambler. The company also said that its website offers all kinds of options to slow players’ gambling, ranging from deposit limits to a cooling-off period.
The court ruled in the gambler’s failure, ordering the casino to refund his losses in full.
This is not the first time a Dutch court ordered an online casino to refund the losses a gambler sustained while gambling illegally online. In November 2023, a Dutch court ordered Unibet and an undisclosed second casino to refund 93,000 and 124,000 euros, respectively.
The attorney who filed the case, Benzi Loonstein, already appealed to online gamblers towards the end of 2022 to consider filing suit against companies unlicensed in the Netherlands. He argued that online gambling companies regularly victimized “vulnerable and young people” who fell deep into debt as a result.
The Netherlands legalized online gambling in October 2021.
