Sweden’s Consumer Ombudsman has taken Svenska Postkodlotteriet to the Patent and Market Court over its Instagram advertising, asking the court to ban the campaign and to attach a financial penalty if the operator keeps running it.
Konsumentverket, the authority that houses the Consumer Ombudsman (KO), says the campaign fails the Swedish Gambling Act’s requirement that marketing for licensed gambling be moderate. That requirement sits in Chapter 15, Section 1 of spellagen (2018:1138), and it has never been tested in detail against social media creative.
What KO objects to in the campaign
KO points to several elements of the Instagram material. One is a video showing money falling over a residential area of houses. Another is the claim, set in gold lettering, that a viewer’s postcode could win SEK 101 million. The campaign also carried a time-limited half-price offer with a purchase deadline and a link through to the lottery’s own site.
Taken together, KO argues, the material created the impression that people were rushing to buy tickets before the offer closed. Urgency of that kind is the sort of pressure the moderation rule is meant to keep out of gambling marketing, and KO treats the combination of the jackpot figure, the imagery and the countdown as the problem.
The authority has asked the court to set the penalty at a level that means something to a company of this size. In its filing it refers to Postkodlotteriet’s 2025 annual report, which shows lottery revenue of around SEK 3.5 billion, as the basis for what it calls a relatively high level.
KO wants the moderation standard defined
The case is as much about the standard as about this campaign. Swedish regulators and licensees have argued over what moderate marketing actually means since the licensing system opened in 2019, and the wording of the Gambling Act leaves a wide margin for interpretation.
“We want clarification on what the Gambling Act’s requirement for moderation means,” said Elin Berner, legal counsel at KO.
A ruling from the Patent and Market Court would give operators, affiliates and agencies something firmer than guidance to work from. It would also apply beyond lotteries. The moderation requirement covers every licence category in the Swedish market, so a decision on jackpot imagery, prize figures and deadline offers would land on sportsbook and casino marketing as well.
Postkodlotteriet rejects the assessment
The operator does not accept that its Instagram advertising breached the rules, and says it welcomes a court review.
“We do not share the Consumer Ombudsman’s assessment and therefore it is good that this is being tested,” Svenska Postkodlotteriet said in a press release.
Postkodlotteriet holds a Swedish lottery licence and runs a subscription model in which players buy entries tied to their postcode, with a share of proceeds going to charitable organisations. That charitable structure does not exempt it from the marketing rules, which apply to all licensed gambling in Sweden regardless of where the surplus goes.
Spelinspektionen keeps its own pressure on lottery licensees
The court case runs alongside separate supervisory work by Spelinspektionen, the Swedish Gambling Authority. Last month the regulator reported the results of checks on five other Swedish lottery licensees and found deficiencies in the information printed on physical lottery tickets.
Those checks covered technical requirements under the Gambling Act and the requirement for a fixed winning plan under the Gambling Ordinance, as well as the information duties set out in Chapter 8, Sections 1 to 2 of LIFS 2018:4. The two strands of enforcement come from different bodies. Spelinspektionen licenses and supervises operators, while KO litigates marketing cases under consumer law, and an operator can face both at once.
Postkodlotteriet now gets to answer KO’s claims in writing before the court moves on. Whatever the Patent and Market Court decides will set the reference point for how far Swedish licensees can go with jackpot figures, countdown offers and the kind of imagery that has become standard on Instagram, and a loss for KO would be read by the industry as licence to keep going.
Source: Konsumentverket
