Online gambling brand Betano must pay back a customer’s losses after a German court found it breached its obligation to enforce player limits.
Enforce the monthly loss limit
Greek game tech company Kaizen Gaming’s brand has been fined by Germany’s Ludwigslust district court, a customer who lost €5,380 ($5,622) between February 20, 2021 and March 4, 2021 with €4,380 ($4,577) to compensate – the amount above the national loss limit of €1,000 ($1,045) per month.
The district court of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern near Hamburg also heard from the client’s lawyer that his client had been registered with the OASIS self-exclusion system and that Betano had breached its obligation to ensure that a player registered with the system should not be allowed to gamble .
“The provider allowed our client to bet more than the permitted 1,000 euros per month, and thus violated the gaming license granted to him,” the lawyer explained the request for reclaiming the limit.
Noting the industry-wide impact of the case, the attorney also implied that many other players may be able to recover their losses.
“Both with online sports betting and online games, for which there was a far-reaching ban in Germany until July 1, 2021, there are good chances of winning back apparently lost stakes,” he stated.
Others can also make up for losses
While this case proved successful and the player will recover most of their losses, other courts in the country didn’t show this kind of lax attitude towards players’ losses, despite dealing with online casino games, an industry in which it Germany was not even legal before July 1, 2021.
So far, court rulings have gone both ways, with the Cologne and Gießen district courts siding with the players and ordering the operators to pay damages, and the Braunschweig and Leipzig district courts deciding in favor of the operators.
In May, the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court upheld the Gießen District Court’s ruling, ordering an unnamed online casino operator to reimburse a player €26,000 ($27,500) – all money the player spent playing with the operator between 2018 and 2020 lost at online casino gambling in Germany was only allowed in the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the operator did not have a German license.
