Finland's National Police Board has imposed conditional fines on six private individuals this year for unlawful gambling marketing. The largest, 100,000 euros, went to the social media personality Anthony Singh on 3 August. It is not yet legally final.

The businessman Jethro Rostedt was fined 25,000 euros in January. He did not appeal, so that decision now stands, and in August the Board attached a further 30,000 euros to reinforce the prohibition against him. The remaining fines run between 20,000 and 33,000 euros and include the streamers Jyri Karvanen and Riku Virtanen.

The documents were obtained by Iltalehti from the Police Board.

The enforcement is accelerating before the market opens

Senior inspector Tomi Sallinen told Iltalehti that reports of unlawful gambling marketing run to a few hundred a year, and that they are up by roughly a fifth on previous years at this point in the calendar.

The decisions tell a sharper story than the reports do.

Five marketing prohibition decisions have been issued this year, against six the year before last and four last year. That is flat. What has changed is what follows a prohibition: six conditional fines imposed this year, against one last year.

The Board is not issuing more prohibitions. It is enforcing the ones it has.

Why an operator should read this as a preview

All of this is happening under the current Lotteries Act, eighteen months before the licensed market opens. None of these individuals is a licensee. Most are not companies at all.

That is the point.

The Gambling Act prohibits influencer marketing outright from July 2027. A licensed operator may market through its own website and its own social media accounts, and nothing else. There is no version of the licensed market in which the arrangements now being fined become legal.

So the enforcement pattern being built this year is the pattern a licensee will meet in 2027, and it has three features worth planning around.

  • It attaches to people. These are fines on private individuals, not on companies. An operator commissioning promotion in Finland is creating personal exposure for the person who publishes it.
  • It escalates on repetition. Rostedt's second fine was larger than his first and was imposed specifically to reinforce a prohibition already in force. The Board's response to a continuing breach is not a repeat of the first penalty.
  • It reaches the money. A site placed on the prohibition list can be put under a payment block, which bars payment service providers from moving funds from players to it. Sallinen also notes that a gambling offence can carry up to two years' imprisonment.

The belief that offshore means out of reach

The Police Board's own framing of the problem is that marketing gambling into Finland from abroad is mistakenly treated as lawful.

That belief is about to become more expensive rather than less. From July 2027 the rules tighten, the marketing routes narrow to an operator's own channels, and supervision moves to an authority built for the job. An operator that has relied on Finnish-language promotion it does not formally control is relying on a structure the regulator has already started dismantling while it is still the Lotteries Act doing the work.

Two figures that do not agree

Sallinen told Iltalehti that the processing time for a licence application is three to six months.

Senior inspector Sanna Kuusela told Yle the same week that the target is six to eight months.

Both are named officials at the same authority, speaking within days of each other. We are not able to reconcile them and we are not going to pick one. Anyone building a launch timetable on a stated processing time should ask the Board directly and get the answer in writing, because the difference between three months and eight months decides whether an application filed this autumn is decided before or after the market opens.

Both accounts agree on the two facts that matter most: 75 applications have been received, and not one has been decided.

The authority has a name

Sallinen also gave the handover a date and a body. The Police Board is processing applications in the order received, and from next summer they will be handled by the Lupa- ja valvontavirasto, Finland's Licensing and Supervision Agency.

We have avoided naming the incoming supervisor in our guides because we could not confirm the official designation. This is the first time we have seen it stated by the current authority, and we have updated the timeline accordingly.

What we do not know

  • Whether the 100,000 euro fine survives appeal. The decision is not legally final.
  • Which operators, if any, commissioned the promotion that led to these decisions. The Board has said only that gambling companies and social media actors have been among those marketing.
  • Whether any conditional fine has actually been collected, as opposed to imposed.
  • How the Licensing and Supervision Agency will approach marketing enforcement once it takes over.