The North Savo District Court fined Finnish content creator Jouko Kärkkäinen €2,480 on 18 June for promoting offshore casino operators to a Finnish audience in breach of the Lotteries Act. The ruling also adds an €80 victim surcharge.
Kärkkäinen ran content under the online alias “pottukoira” across Instagram, the live-streaming platform Kick, and a linked website, pottukoira.com, between May 2023 and February 2024. The court found the posts and streams amounted to unlawful gambling marketing rather than entertainment content, rejecting the main arguments he advanced in his defence.
How the penalty was calculated
The court set the penalty at 80 day-fines. Finland’s day-fine system links the per-day amount to the offender’s net income, so the €2,480 total reflects Kärkkäinen’s personal earnings during the period rather than a fixed statutory rate. The same 80-day count would produce a higher or lower cash figure depending on the recipient’s income. The €80 victim surcharge is a separate mandatory addition under Finnish law.
Content across each channel
The judgment covers promotions published in Finnish across multiple platforms. Posts and streams included specific gambling offers, among them “150 free spins for just €10”, directed at Finnish-speaking audiences. The content linked to pottukoira.com, which carried affiliate links to the casinos featured in the material. Kärkkäinen also added some promotions directly through a chat-bot tool connected to his channels.
The combination of in-stream promotion, an affiliate-linked website, and automated chat-bot offers gave the court a record of promotional activity across multiple touchpoints, not just isolated posts.
Defences rejected
Kärkkäinen advanced three main arguments. First, that his output was entertainment rather than advertising. Second, that the content did not specifically target a Finnish audience. Third, that he did not control pottukoira.com and had spent part of the relevant period in Tallinn, Estonia.
The court rejected each. On the website, judges found it made no legal difference who operated the domain: Kärkkäinen had allowed its links to appear on channels he controlled and had added promotions to those channels himself, including via the chat-bot. The geographic argument failed because the content was in Finnish and directed at Finnish-language audiences, regardless of where he was physically based when it was published.
Judge Adelina Komulainen addressed the question of financial benefit directly:
“Punishing a gambling offence does not require that the defendant be shown to have received consideration or financial benefit from the act.”
On intent, she found the purpose unambiguous:
“Kärkkäinen’s purpose must be regarded as having been to promote the gambling companies’ business operations.”
Finland’s transition period and the marketing ban
The case comes as Finland replaces the Veikkaus state monopoly with a competitive licensed market. Licence applications opened in March 2026, but the Lotteries Act’s ban on marketing gambling operators other than Veikkaus remains in force until the new regime begins on 1 July 2027. The content Kärkkäinen published between May 2023 and February 2024 fell squarely inside that restriction.
The prosecution signals that Finnish authorities are treating the transition period as fully enforceable under current law, not as an informal tolerance zone for content creators or affiliates anticipating the new market.
Influencer-led casino promotion has drawn regulatory attention across Europe. Entain’s recent investigation into an illegal gambling network on UK social media documented how affiliate-linked content can scale into organised promotional chains built on a similar mechanic: social channels directing audiences to affiliated casino sites. Denmark is heading toward its own advertising restrictions even as its market opens to competition, following the same pattern of Nordic regulators prioritising controlled marketing environments during market transitions. Europe’s 2025 compliance overview tracked this tightening across markets; the Kärkkäinen ruling adds a concrete enforcement data point to it.
What affiliates face from 2027
Finland’s licensed market opens on 1 July 2027. From that point, operators holding Finnish licences will be permitted to market to Finnish consumers, with content creators and affiliates working with those operators also expected to align with the new regime’s marketing rules.
The Kärkkäinen case establishes that enforcement extends to individual content creators, not just operators, and that a commercial purpose can be found even where direct financial consideration is unproven. Affiliates planning to operate in the Finnish market from 2027 will need compliance in place from the date the regime comes into force — not a day earlier than required, but not later either.
Source: North Savo District Court
