Norsk Tipping fined €3.9 million over decade-long lottery errors

• Norway’s Lottery and Foundations Authority imposed a NOK 46 million fine on state-owned Norsk Tipping for technical errors affecting Eurojackpot and Lotto draws
• The fault, dating back to 2015, gave cooperative groups and gambling clubs unfairly higher winning odds than individual players
• Norsk Tipping accepted the fine but delayed investigating the problem for months after receiving warnings from regulators

Norway’s Lottery and Foundations Authority has imposed a NOK 46 million (€3.9 million) fine on state-owned gambling operator Norsk Tipping for technical errors that skewed lottery odds for nearly a decade.

The penalty was confirmed on 1 September following a regulatory investigation into systematic faults affecting the Eurojackpot and Lotto draws. The technical error, which persisted from 2015 to 2025, gave players participating through cooperatives, gaming clubs, and lottery banks unfairly higher chances of winning compared to individual players.

The fault affected millions of Norwegian players across thousands of draws, with approximately 1.5 million people playing Eurojackpot and nearly 2 million playing Lotto annually.

“Players should be able to trust that Norsk Tipping’s games are safe and fair. The error itself is serious, and it is aggravating that it was not discovered until many years had passed,” said Atle Hamar, director of the Lottery and Foundations Authority.

The regulator first alerted Norsk Tipping to potential problems with the Eurojackpot draw in November 2024, but the operator chose not to investigate further. The company received another warning on 24 January 2025 but conducted two additional draws before finally examining the issue.

Hamar expressed particular concern about the delayed response, stating:

“With the market position Norsk Tipping has, one can expect that such errors will be discovered and corrected immediately. This is careless, and the threshold for investigating possible errors has been too high”.

The fine represents approximately 0.45% of Norsk Tipping’s 2024 turnover of NOK 10.2 billion (€876 million).

The technical fault particularly affected Eurojackpot extra draws and Lotto super draws, where the misconfigured drawing mechanisms systematically disadvantaged solo players whilst favouring group participants.

Regulators described the error as creating “wrong winners in every single draw over several years”.

This marks the third major penalty imposed on Norsk Tipping within a year, following a NOK 36 million fine for self-exclusion system failures and a NOK 4.5 million penalty for excessive casino payouts that breached Norway’s prize limits. The accumulating sanctions have prompted calls for tighter regulatory supervision of the monopoly operator’s lottery games.

The penalty comes as some Norwegian political figures question whether a competitive licensing model might better serve players than the current monopoly system, which will become the last Nordic gambling monopoly when Sweden’s transition concludes in 2027. The repeated technical failures have intensified scrutiny of Norsk Tipping’s operational standards and quality control procedures.