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Wrong signals: Oliver Kahn and the limits of tolerability
It’s not exactly a credit to Oliver Kahn, the boss of FC Bayern Munich, to have advertised a highly dubious sports betting provider for years. This company based in Malta has only had an official, valid and recognized concession for the whole of Germany for around two and a half years. Before that, there was only a license for Schleswig-Holstein. However, like many of its competitors, the provider had offered online betting throughout Germany. Wrongly so, as the Heilbronn district court ruled earlier this month and followed the legal tenor of almost 180 similar judgments, which, however, involved rather small sums. The sports betting provider has to fully reimburse a customer from the Heilbronn district for the losses he suffered between 2014 and 2020. The passionate football fan, who put almost his entire inheritance at risk, can look forward to the repayment of a total of 377,432 euros and around 78,000 euros in interest.
A month earlier, the district court of Heidelberg had awarded a woman who lost a six-figure sum at roulette in an online casino the refund of that 226,807 euros plus 30,000 euros in interest. As in the case of sports betting, the judges had also ruled in the case of online gambling: this offer on the Internet was not permissible. Two judgments in favor of clients of Thomas Schopf, the founder of “HFS-Rechtsanwälte” in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg. His law firm has specialized in such cases together with the start-up “Chargeback24”, which digitally determines individual gaming losses and thus does the elementary preparatory work for successful lawsuits. “Without this help, we would not be able to evaluate player accounts quickly, especially in sports betting,” reported Thomas Schopf jW.
The success in the two most recent proceedings with high repayment claims “was important because it was once again a clearly visible peg from a legal point of view,” says Schopf. With the two prominent decisions, the courts have once again made it clear what they think of the business practices of online providers as they were handled until market regulation and state licenses were issued at the end of 2020. Until three years ago there was a “bad gray area” for which there was a rough legal framework, but which was ignored and undermined by the providers on the Internet: whether in terms of content with the help of increasingly sophisticated offers, or in terms of the amount of the stakes , whose prescribed cap at 1,000 euros per month was disregarded. “Otherwise, individual players could not have suffered such high losses, behind which of course personal fates are always hidden,” says Thomas Schopf. “I know from our practice and from other law firms that some clients have even lost a million or more.” There are currently thousands of procedures in which those affected are seeking reimbursement of their losses. “And there are more every day.”
As much as the lawyer and his colleagues welcome the subsequent processing of illegal and dubious practices in the gambling and sports betting sector, he wants the repayment of the sometimes considerable sums to be understood as a reminder and warning – for all customers at the current nationwide around three dozen providers of online sports betting and gambling operating with an official license. According to lawyer Schopf, the average value in dispute for each of his clients for repayments up to 2020 is between 30,000 euros and 40,000 euros. Which illustrates how high the financial risks and the potential for addiction are to be assessed in this segment.
Meanwhile, the dangers for the players are by no means averted with the state regulation of the billion-euro business, the granting of licenses and the legal prosecution of the “black sheep”. On the contrary, observers of the scene are alarmed and warn of the disastrous flood, for example in sports betting advertising. Markus Sotirianos, co-initiator of the alliance against sports betting advertising (BgSwW) formed last year, speaks of “completely wrong signals”. According to the German Association for Telecommunications and Media e. V., the industry’s annual advertising budget increased by almost a third to 571 million euros from 2019 to 2020 alone. The sports betting providers, who have recently been able to celebrate double-digit sales growth year after year, pumped around 75 percent of the sums into advertising that the German automotive industry spends on them.
The Federal Center for Health Education in Cologne considers the risk of addiction to be “particularly high” in sports bettors. Our own evaluations of behavior and addiction among gamblers from 2019 have shown that the betting behavior of around 229,000 people nationwide can be classified as “problematic” and that of around 200,000 more as “probably pathological”. »The players have the illusion that they can outsmart the laws of the bookmakers with their sports knowledge. But the odds are designed in such a way that the provider almost always wins in the end,” warns Markus Sotirianos. Sports betting advertising monopolizes fan culture, downplays and normalizes gambling, and the dangers of addiction are not adequately pointed out and the protection of minors is not respected. “Above all, those interested in football can hardly escape this advertising,” the BgSwW spokesman appealed to the conscience of advertising figures like Oliver Kahn. »For us, the limit of tolerability has been exceeded.«
