ANJ hits online operator with €500,000 duty-of-care fine

• France’s gambling regulator ANJ has fined an unnamed online betting operator €500,000 for duty-of-care failures.
• Investigators found the operator failed to correctly identify 29 of 30 high-risk players examined between October 2023 and March 2024.
• The Sanctions Committee rejected the operator’s defence, including its argument that French law lacks a definition of “pathological” gambling.

France’s Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) has fined an unnamed online betting operator €500,000 (approximately $573,000) after its Sanctions Committee found the company failed to identify and support customers showing signs of excessive or pathological gambling.

The ruling, dated 10 July and published 15 July 2026, concludes an investigation covering account activity between 1 October 2023 and 31 March 2024.

Vault data review

Using data from the operator’s secure “coffre-fort” archive, ANJ investigators assessed 30 players against seven indicators drawn from France’s reference framework for preventing excessive and pathological gambling. These covered deposit frequency, lost deposits, betting volume, changes to gambling controls and self-exclusion activity.

The regulator based its final case on 29 of those accounts. Six players were not identified as at-risk at all, and 23 were placed in a lower risk category than investigators considered appropriate. A further 25 received support measures judged insufficient to curb their gambling.

The committee found that the operator had failed to meet its obligations for “almost all” of the players assessed, missing risk signals in some cases and misjudging risk levels in others.

Operator pushes back

The operator disputed the findings, arguing French law does not provide a precise statutory definition of “pathological” gambling. It also challenged specific elements of the scoring model, including how completed bets were counted and how voluntary deposit limits carried over across reopened accounts.

The company said automated warning emails, exclusion from some promotions and fraud-related account suspensions amounted to adequate intervention. It pointed to an upgraded detection algorithm and an expanded player-protection team, citing a 28% average reduction in net losses over a 90-day period as evidence against a heavy penalty.

The operator has faced ANJ sanctions before. In 2024 it was fined for breaching the statutory maximum payout ceiling relating to 2022 activity, though the committee treated the two cases separately and did not escalate the latest penalty on that basis.

Framework upheld

The Sanctions Committee rejected the operator’s defence, confirming that the reference framework is clear and directly enforceable under French law. It upheld the appropriateness of the ANJ’s indicators and scoring methodology, and said the fine reflected the “seriousness of the breaches,” their impact and their duration.

The operator has a two-month window to lodge an administrative appeal with the Conseil d’État.

The case is a reminder that France, which recently cleared Bet365 to launch ahead of the World Cup, continues to pair market growth with strict enforcement of player protection rules. It follows the ANJ’s 2024-2026 strategic plan, which set a target of reducing excessive and pathological gambling by 2027, a goal the regulator reinforced when it flagged the need for concrete results earlier this year.

The ruling also follows the ANJ’s rollout of a new detection algorithm in May 2026, designed to flag more potential problem gamblers than operators typically catch through their own systems. Licensees weighing the cost of upgrading their own detection tools now have a clear benchmark for what non-compliance costs.