France’s gambling authority, the ANJ, has issued a €75,000 fine to a licensed online operator after repeated breaches of data archiving obligations.
Data archiving was introduced as a strict regulatory requirement in French law when the online gambling market was first opened to competition in 2010, and is designed to ensure transparency, integrity and player protection.
Over a period of 25 months between 2022 – 2024, the unnamed operator failed on two separate occasions to comply with the legal duty to archive customer gaming and player account data in real time, and to ensure its permanent availability to the ANJ. These failures represented breaches of Articles 31 and 38 of the Law of 12 May 2010, and Articles 29 and 30 of the Decree of 19 May 2010.
The first breach involved the operator failing to submit certain data on player bets which resulted in the exclusion of several million euros’ worth of bets from the hardware archiving system.
The second violation related to the provision of inaccurate data, which affected over 900,000 records.
According to the ANJ, by not respecting its obligations and by failing to ensure the “completeness and accuracy of the data to be contained in the safe of the hardware archiving system,” the operator obstructed key regulatory objectives outlined in Article L. 320-3 of the Internal Security Code.
These include: ensuring the integrity, reliability and transparency of gaming operations, identifying and supporting excessive or pathological players and enabling the ANJ to carry out its regulatory and supervisory role.
The ANJ added: “A failure in the transmission of this information also has a significant impact on the controls carried out by the ANJ, particularly concerning the control of the player return rate and the detection of pathological players.”
The sanctions committee determined that the duration and seriousness of the failings warranted the aforementioned €75,000 financial penalty.
ANJ continues to crack down on player protection throughout the French gambling market. In March this year, it handed out an even heftier fine of €800,000 fine to Unibet following a serious and prolonged malfunction in its self-exclusion system – a failure that allowed thousands of self-excluded users to regain access to gambling services. The issue, which primarily affected iOS users, spanned nearly two years and marked the largest financial sanction issued by the ANJ since its formation in 2020 as the central authority for gambling oversight in France.
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