Online gambling brand Betano will have to reimburse a client’s losses after a German court found it in breach of the obligation to enforce player limits.
Enforce the Monthly Loss Limit
The brand owned by Greek game tech company Kaizen Gaming was ordered by the German District Court of Ludwigslust to compensate a client who had lost €5,380 ($5,622) between February 20, 2021 and March 4, 2021, with €4,380 ($4,577) – the amount above the national loss limit of €1,000 ($1,045) per month.
The court located in the state 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 Betano violated its obligation to ensure that a player registered with the scheme should not be allowed to gamble.
“The provider allowed our client to bet more than the allowed €1,000 per month and thus violated the gaming license granted to him,” the lawyer stated while explaining the request for recovering anything above the limit.
Considering the industry-wide implications of the case, the lawyer also implied that many other players may be able to recover their losses.
“Both in online sports betting and in online games, for which there was a far-reaching ban in Germany until July 1, 2021, there is a good chance of recovering stakes that seem to have been lost,” he stated.
Others May Recover Losses Too
While this case proved to be successful and the player will recover most of his losses, other courts in the country did not show this type of a lax attitude towards players’ losses despite dealing with online casino gaming, a vertical that was not even legal in Germany before July 1, 2021.
Court rulings have gone both ways so far after the Cologne Regional Court and the Giessen Regional Court sided with the players and ordered the operators to reimburse the losses, and Braunschweig and Leipzig regional courts ruled in favor of the operators.
In May, Frankfurt’s Higher Regional Court confirmed the Giessen Regional Court ruling and ordered an unnamed online casino operator to reimburse a player with €26,000 ($27,500) – all the money the player lost while gambling with the operator between 2018 and 2020 when online casino gaming in Germany was only allowed in the state of Schleswig-Holstein and the operator did not hold a German license.