What Sweden's Affiliate Crackdown Looks Like From the Inside

Sweden's gambling regulator, Spelinspektionen, published a report this week naming affiliate networks, livestreamers, and social media influencers as some of the main channels still driving traffic to unlicensed gambling sites in the country. For an affiliate industry that has spent years working to distance itself from that reputation, it's a pointed reminder that the line between licensed and unlicensed promotion is still being drawn, and policed, in real time. We talked with Freddi Nilsson at Casinogringos.se, about what the report gets right, where it misses the mark, and what it's actually like running a licensed-market comparison site in one of Europe's strictest regulatory environments. 

Q: Spelinspektionen flagged affiliate link networks and "link farms" redirecting traffic to unlicensed casinos as a primary channel for illegal promotion. As a licensed-market affiliate, do you see that as a fair characterization, or does it lump legitimate affiliates in with bad actors?

A: I think it's a fair description of a real problem. And to be honest I don’t think Spelinspektionen is lumping us together with bad actors. They are aware about the distinction between affiliates promoting licensed operators and this disposable link-farm infrastructure. Where the lumping actually happens is further upstream. Search engines doesn't seem to care whether the result sitting at position one is promoting a licensed or unlicensed operator, it's all just 'gambling content' to the algorithm. And a lot of players searching for a casino don't necessarily know to check for a license at all, so from where they're standing, a link-farm site and a site like ours can look nearly identical for the three seconds it takes to click through. 

The confusion is understandable from the outside, since both use the word "affiliate", and the underlying mechanics are similar: you send players to an operator, you get paid for it. The difference is that we've made a decision to only work with Swedish-licensed operators, build something with a name and a track record behind it, and stay accountable to that. 

Q: The report describes .se domains that redirect to English-language, offshore sites, masking jurisdiction while still targeting Swedish players. Have you seen this in practice, and is there anything legitimate affiliates can do to flag it?

A: I have seen versions of this, yes. The pattern is usually a .se domain that looks legitimate, Swedish language, Swedish visual cues, sometimes even styled to resemble a comparison site like ours, but it's really just a first step. You click through and land on a second site, usually a .com, suddenly in English, which is the actual affiliate operation, and from there you get routed to the unlicensed casino itself. So it's less a direct redirect and more a chain: Swedish-looking front door, English-language affiliate site in the middle, offshore operator at the end. Each step puts a bit more distance between what the player thought they were clicking on and where their money actually ends up.

It's a genuinely hard thing for an ordinary player to catch, since nothing about that first .se domain gives away where the chain leads. For legitimate affiliates, the most useful thing we can do is probably reporting these when we spot them, since we're often better positioned to recognize a fake or copycat setup than a regulator scanning at scale. Whether that reporting channel is well-used across the industry is a separate question.

Q: Deepfakes of Swedish public figures are apparently being used to falsely legitimize gambling ads. How damaging is that kind of content to trust in the affiliate channel more broadly, including for sites like yours?

A: This is the one I'd call genuinely corrosive, more than the link-farm issue. A repurposed domain is a technical problem; a deepfake of a trusted public figure "endorsing" a gambling site is an emotional manipulation problem, and it erodes something that's much harder to rebuild, which is a player's basic instinct about who to believe. Every legitimate comparison site depends on some baseline of trust that what we're presenting is honest. When bad actors use synthetic media to borrow credibility they haven't earned, it makes every endorsement, ours included, slightly more suspect by association. 

Q: A March 2026 case saw an influencer sentenced to 22 months in prison for economic crimes tied to unlicensed gambling promotion, the first of its kind in Sweden. Does that change the calculus for people operating in this space, or is the deterrent effect likely limited to the most blatant cases?

A: I think it matters, but mostly at the extremes. A criminal sentence like that sends an clear signal to anyone running promotion at real scale with obvious intent, which is useful. What I have noticed since that sentence is a bit of a workaround rather than a stop: some Swedish streamers who used to promote unlicensed casinos openly in Swedish have simply switched to streaming in English instead. Nothing else about the audience changes, it's still mostly Swedish viewers, but suddenly the content isn't 'targeting' Sweden in the way the law cares about, at least not obviously. That kind of shift was already happening before the sentence, but it does seem to have picked up since. 

Where I'm less convinced anything changes is the long tail below that: the international meme accounts casually dropping a promo code, or the small-scale streamer who doesn't think of themselves as 'the target' of this kind of enforcement at all. Deterrence tends to work best on people who are already weighing risk rationally, and the language switch itself is a decent example of that, it's a fairly calculated response, not a retreat from the activity. A lot of the smaller-scale activity doesn't look like that kind of calculation, it just looks like people who haven't thought about it. 

Q: The EU's Digital Fairness Act, expected to tighten influencer marketing rules later this year, looms over this whole space. What are you watching for, and do you expect it to meaningfully change affiliate operations, or mostly formalize what strict markets like Sweden already do?

A: Mostly I'd expect it to formalize, at an EU level, things that markets like Sweden have already been enforcing informally through existing gambling law. What I'll actually be watching for is how it defines and polices influencer disclosure requirements outside gambling-specific contexts, since a lot of the promotion Spelinspektionen is describing hides inside general entertainment or comedy content rather than clearly gambling-branded posts. If the DFA tightens disclosure rules broadly across influencer marketing, that closes a loophole gambling-specific rules alone can't really reach. 

Q: Channelization to licensed Swedish operators has hovered around 80 to 85%. As an affiliate that only lists licensed sites, how do you think about the players who end up unlicensed instead: a market you're competing for, or one you've written off?

A: Honestly, the players who end up on unlicensed sites aren't really who we're competing for, and I don't think that's a defeatist answer, it's just how the incentives line up. Our whole value proposition is trust and safety within the licensed market; someone actively choosing an unlicensed operator, often for bigger bonuses or fewer restrictions, isn't shopping for what we're offering in the first place. Where I do think affiliates have a role is in that murkier middle group: players who don't fully realize a site is unlicensed and might choose differently if the distinction were clearer. 

Q: Sweden brought in a full ban on credit-funded gambling deposits this year. Has that changed anything meaningful about player behavior on your site, or was it a smaller shift than the headlines suggested?

A: Honestly, from what I've seen, not much, though I'd say that carefully. Swish and Trustly have been the dominant deposit methods here for years already according to our data. Mostly because they're just faster and easier with BankID, so a lot of players were never using credit to begin with. I haven't seen anything on our site that looks like a meaningful shift in deposit patterns since the ban took effect. That said, I don't have visibility into full market-wide deposit-mix data, that sits with Spelinspektionen and individual operators, so it's possible there's a more measurable effect showing up in numbers I just don't have access to. 

Q: What's one thing about running a comparison site in a market like Sweden that people outside the Nordics (operators, other affiliates, regulators abroad) consistently misunderstand?

A: I think the biggest misconception is that "strict regulation" and "healthy market" are in tension. 

From where I sit, the restrictions on bonus advertising and marketing volume haven't killed competition, they've just redirected it toward things like payment speed, product experience, and actual trustworthiness, rather than who can shout the loudest bonus offer. People outside the market sometimes assume heavy regulation flattens an industry. In practice it's just changed what companies here compete on.