Bet3000 and the GGL: How much Evidence was enough?

On 26 July 2024, shortly after midday, an email arrived at the Gemeinsame Glücksspielbehörde der Länder that would later become part of the proceedings surrounding Bet3000’s German licence. It had been sent by lawyer Dr. Damir Böhm and concerned reports about activity in betting shops previously associated with Bet3000. Dr. Böhm was quite clear about the status of the information. He was passing on what he had been told by people connected with betting intermediaries, not describing something he had personally witnessed, and he expressly suggested that the regulator use its own means to verify it.

That distinction would normally be unremarkable. Regulators receive information from lawyers, competitors, customers and people working within an industry every day, and there is no reason why Dr. Böhm should not have approached the GGL with something he believed the authority ought to investigate. What makes the Bet3000 episode worth looking at again is the speed with which the information moved from Dr. Böhm’s email into the regulator’s court case, and the noticeably firmer language used once it got there.

Later on the same day, the GGL referred to material connected with Dr. Böhm in a submission to the Administrative Court in Halle. The filing concerned alleged continued betting activity through TipGo in premises associated with Bet3000 and included references to a betting slip, source code and video material. By this stage, however, the regulator was no longer merely describing an allegation somebody had asked it to check. Its submission said the relevant facts had been made “glaubhaft” and referred to “Feststellungen” associated with Dr. Böhm.

The difference is worth examining because Bet3000 was already fighting an immediately enforceable licence revocation. The GGL had revoked the company’s German gambling licence on 24 July, Bet3000 had challenged the decision the following day and the dispute was already before the court when Dr. Böhm’s email arrived. In that situation, the question is not whether the regulator was allowed to act quickly. It plainly was. The question is what it established for itself before information originally presented for verification became part of the evidential case it was making against the operator.

What Dr. Böhm actually told the regulator

The original email is considerably more cautious than some of the later descriptions of it might suggest. Dr. Böhm wrote that information had reached him “from within the circle of our betting agents” and referred to reports that customers were allegedly being told they could continue depositing money in former Bet3000 betting shops and place bets through TipGo. He then added a sentence which should not be lost when looking at everything that happened afterwards: “Evtl. können Sie mit Ihren Mitteln dies verifizieren lassen.”

In plain English, Dr. Böhm was asking the GGL to check the information with the tools available to the regulator. That is a sensible way of handling information obtained from third parties and, if anything, it shows that Dr. Böhm himself was drawing a line between what had been reported to him and what had actually been established. There is no contradiction in taking the report seriously while still recognising that further verification was required.

The GGL was certainly in a position to carry out that work. It is the authority responsible for regulating large parts of Germany’s cross-state online gambling market and for enforcing the rules against both licensed and illegal providers. Its own description of its role says that it checks gambling offers, supervises authorised providers and acts against illegal gambling. The authority therefore had considerably greater investigative possibilities than the sender of an email, which is presumably why Dr. Böhm asked it to verify the information in the first place.

What is missing from the documents we have reviewed is a clear account of what happened during the hours immediately afterwards. The GGL’s later filing shows that additional material existed, including the TipGo betting slip, source code and video. Those items may well have confirmed that betting activity was taking place somewhere, but they do not necessarily answer the more important question of who was responsible for it, who had authorised it and whether Bet3000 itself had instructed anybody to continue operating after the licence decision.

The same afternoon, the wording had changed

The chronology becomes particularly uncomfortable because there was so little time between the original email and the GGL’s filing. Dr. Böhm sent his message at 12:15 on 26 July. Later that day, the regulator was already relying on material linked to him before the Administrative Court in Halle.

There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for that speed. GGL officials could already have been examining the premises, they may have possessed information from other sources or the video and technical evidence may have allowed them to confirm parts of the allegation quickly. None of those possibilities can be ruled out from the documents we have seen.

The difficulty is that the available record does not make that process particularly clear. We can follow the information into the regulator and we can see it again in the court submission, but the investigative work between those two points remains difficult to reconstruct. Considering the seriousness of an immediately enforceable licence revocation, that is exactly the part of the file that deserves closer attention.

The language used by the GGL also deserves to be read carefully. Dr. Böhm had passed on information obtained from others and asked for verification, while the authority subsequently referred to “Feststellungen” associated with him and said that the relevant assertion had been made credible. A regulator may be perfectly entitled to reach that view after looking at additional evidence, but if that happened within a matter of hours the supporting work should be capable of being identified.

This is especially important because evidence of activity inside a betting shop is not automatically evidence that Bet3000 instructed the activity. Premises can continue to carry branding after commercial arrangements change, intermediaries can act independently and individual operators can make decisions which were never authorised by the licence holder. The GGL therefore needed to establish considerably more than the simple fact that somebody could apparently place a bet through TipGo from a location previously connected with Bet3000.

Dr. Böhm’s clarification five days later

On 31 July, Dr. Böhm sent another communication which considerably sharpened that distinction. He stated that, in order to be completely accurate, there were no indications that the alleged instruction had originated from within Bet3000.

That does not make his first email disappear, nor does it mean the activity originally reported to him had not taken place. What it does is narrow the allegation in an important way. Dr. Böhm was making clear that the information available to him did not establish that Bet3000 itself had told anyone to continue taking deposits or facilitating wagers.

In a licensing dispute, that difference is substantial. If Bet3000 had directly instructed continued gambling operations following the withdrawal of its permission, that would be one type of case. If somebody previously connected with Bet3000 acted independently and without instruction from the company, the position would be quite different. The location alone cannot answer that question.

The way the GGL dealt with the 31 July clarification therefore deserves the same scrutiny as its treatment of the original email. If the earlier information was important enough to be placed before the court within hours, a later clarification limiting what could be attributed to Bet3000 should also have been dealt with promptly and visibly. The documents currently available to Malta Media do not provide a clear answer on how that qualification was incorporated into the ongoing administrative case.

The later judgment has often been given too much weight

The September 2024 judgment concerning Dr. Böhm’s email adds another layer to the story, but it does not settle the central issue surrounding the GGL’s own verification. The court accepted that Dr. Böhm had received information before he contacted the regulator and did not accept the argument that he had simply invented the report. It also considered his explanation for not identifying the people who had supplied the information and ultimately found his account credible on that central point.

At the same time, the judgment records discrepancies in some of the detail. In his written affidavit, Dr. Böhm referred to information from franchisees of Tipwin Limited, while during the hearing he described those providing information as clients whose reports he had forwarded in his capacity as a lawyer. The court also noted differing accounts over whether the allegation concerned one betting shop or several. The judges did not consider those points sufficiently important to undermine the core of Dr. Böhm’s evidence, which was that information had reached him before he wrote to the GGL.

That is a perfectly legitimate finding, but its scope needs to be respected. The judgment established that Dr. Böhm had received reports and was entitled to pass on the suspicion. It did not establish that Bet3000 itself issued the alleged instruction, and it did not retrospectively tell us what the GGL had independently verified during the afternoon of 26 July.

There is also an important commercial aspect in the judgment. The court accepted that Dr. Böhm was acting not only as a lawyer but also in his capacity as a director of a company competing with Bet3000. It nevertheless concluded that communicating the suspicion to the regulator was not unlawful. That leaves the focus exactly where it should be: not on attacking Dr. Böhm for contacting the GGL, but on asking how carefully the authority treated information which came from somebody connected to a competitor.

A regulator is supposed to separate information from evidence

There is nothing unusual about one gambling company supplying information about another. The German market is relatively small, people know one another and companies inevitably hear about what competitors, intermediaries and former business partners are doing. Some of that information will be accurate and valuable to a regulator, while other reports may turn out to be incomplete or based on misunderstandings.

The regulator’s job is to make that distinction. Receiving information is only the start of the process, particularly where the source is commercially connected to another operator and the consequences for the company being investigated can include the loss of its licence. Dr. Böhm’s email itself recognised that when it invited the GGL to conduct its own verification.

That makes the GGL’s investigative work much more interesting than the identity of the original source. If officials established who controlled the premises, who instructed the staff, where the money was going and whether Bet3000 had any operational connection to the activity, then those findings would answer much of the criticism surrounding the episode. If the evidence only established that betting activity involving TipGo was taking place in premises previously associated with Bet3000, the regulator was dealing with a rather different proposition.

The distinction is particularly relevant because the later clarification from Dr. Böhm expressly removed any suggestion that he had information showing the instruction originated from Bet3000. Once that clarification was on the record, the GGL had even more reason to be precise about what it was attributing to the company and what remained an allegation concerning activity at the premises.

Germany’s illegal market makes the comparison difficult to avoid

The Bet3000 case becomes more interesting when placed next to the GGL’s approach to illegal gambling. Malta Media has repeatedly examined the continuing problem of unlicensed operators reaching German customers, including our reporting on the visibility of illegal gambling in Germany. The regulator itself says it identifies illegal gambling offers and shares findings with the relevant prosecution and financial authorities, which then conduct their own investigations.

That process understandably takes time. Offshore companies have to be identified, ownership structures traced, payment providers examined and evidence collected before measures can survive legal challenge. The GGL also maintains Germany’s official whitelist of authorised gambling providers, which it tells consumers to use when establishing whether an online gambling offer is legal.

Nobody would seriously argue that action against an offshore illegal operator and proceedings involving an already licensed German company are procedurally identical. They are not. What can reasonably be compared is the care given to evidence before serious enforcement action is taken.

That is what makes the timing on 26 July so striking. The GGL received a third-party report in which Dr. Böhm himself suggested verification, and the material was already feeding into the authority’s court submission later the same day. There may have been enough independent evidence to justify that speed, but after almost two years of argument around the case there is little reason for the verification process itself still to be unclear.

Licensed operators are expected to prove almost everything

German gambling regulation places a considerable compliance burden on licensed operators. They have to meet detailed requirements around player protection, technical systems and operational controls, while the GGL says its task includes ensuring that authorised providers comply with the rules designed to protect players from addiction and manipulation.

That is part of operating in a regulated industry and Bet3000 is no more entitled to escape those requirements than any other company. If the GGL can demonstrate serious breaches by an operator, it should take appropriate action and defend those decisions in court.

The same standard of care should apply to the authority’s own evidence. A regulator demanding extensive documentation from licence holders cannot reasonably expect its own route from allegation to verified fact to remain vague when that evidence is used to support one of the most serious decisions it can take against an operator.

This is also why the Bet3000 case should not be reduced to an argument between the company and the regulator. Other licensed operators have an obvious interest in knowing how information from competitors or third parties is assessed, particularly where it can rapidly become part of regulatory proceedings. A consistent system protects the regulator as much as the operator because it makes decisions easier to defend and far harder to dismiss as selective.

What the GGL can answer without compromising an investigation

The outstanding questions are fairly practical. The GGL can explain whether officials independently established who controlled the betting shops referred to in Dr. Böhm’s email, whether they confirmed who had instructed the alleged continuation of betting and whether they found a direct operational link to Bet3000. It can also explain when the betting slip, source code and video became available and how each item contributed to the position eventually placed before the Administrative Court.

The regulator can also clarify what happened after Dr. Böhm’s email of 31 July. If his later communication made clear that he had no indication that the instruction originated from Bet3000, the obvious issue is whether the court was informed of that limitation and whether the GGL adjusted any part of its earlier argument as a result.

Answering those points would not require the GGL to identify confidential sources or publish sensitive investigative methods. It would simply make the chronology understandable and show what work the regulator itself did before attributing evidential weight to information originating outside the authority.

That explanation would also help settle a wider issue which has followed the GGL through several disputes. Germany’s regulator has repeatedly stressed the need for a strong legal market and effective action against illegal gambling. For licensed companies to have confidence in that system, they also need to know that regulatory decisions affecting them are being built on evidence which has been tested with the same seriousness expected from the operators themselves.

This case should ultimately be quite easy to clarify

Bet3000 does not need a special evidential standard and should not receive one. If the company breached its obligations and the GGL has the evidence to demonstrate that, the regulator should be able to rely on it. Equally, the company should not face a lower threshold simply because a licence dispute was already under way or because information was supplied by somebody connected with a competitor.

The documents from July 2024 leave a straightforward gap. Dr. Böhm passed on information he had received, clearly suggested that the GGL verify it and, five days later, clarified that he had no indication the alleged instruction originated from Bet3000. Between those events, the regulator used material linked to his report in its court case and described the matter in considerably firmer terms.

The missing part is the GGL’s own verification. If the video, technical evidence and other investigative work established a direct link to Bet3000 before the 26 July filing, the authority should set that out. If the evidence established only that activity was continuing at premises previously connected with the company, that should be stated just as clearly.

After everything that has happened around Bet3000’s German licence, this is no longer a technical argument about the wording of one email. It is about how Germany’s national gambling regulator distinguishes an allegation received from the market from evidence it is prepared to rely upon against a licensed operator. A regulator which demands detailed proof from the businesses it supervises should have no difficulty explaining where that line was drawn in one of its own most contentious cases.

FAQs

What is the Bet3000 dispute with the GGL about?
The dispute concerns the GGL's revocation of Bet3000's German gambling licence and questions about the evidence and verification process used during the subsequent regulatory proceedings.

When did the GGL revoke Bet3000's German gambling licence?
According to the documents reviewed in the article, the GGL revoked Bet3000's German gambling licence on 24 July 2024. Bet3000 challenged the decision the following day.

Who is Dr. Damir Böhm?
Dr. Damir Böhm is the lawyer who contacted the GGL on 26 July 2024 with information he said had reached him from people connected with betting intermediaries.

What did Dr. Böhm tell the GGL?
He reported allegations that customers could continue depositing money and placing bets through TipGo at former Bet3000 betting shops. He also suggested that the GGL independently verify the information.

Why is the GGL's verification process important?
The article questions what the regulator independently established before information originally presented for verification became part of its evidential case against Bet3000.

What evidence was mentioned in the GGL's court filing?
The filing referred to material including a TipGo betting slip, source code and video evidence connected with alleged continued betting activity.

Did Dr. Böhm say Bet3000 ordered betting to continue?
His later communication on 31 July stated that there were no indications available to him that the alleged instruction had originated from Bet3000.

What did the September 2024 judgment establish?
The court accepted that Dr. Böhm had received information before contacting the regulator and had not simply invented the report. However, it did not establish that Bet3000 itself issued the alleged instruction.

What role does the GGL have in German gambling regulation?
The GGL regulates cross-state gambling in Germany, particularly online gambling, supervises authorised providers and takes action against illegal gambling.

Why could the Bet3000 case matter to other licensed operators?
The case raises broader questions about how information supplied by competitors or third parties is verified before being used in regulatory proceedings that can have serious consequences for licensed operators.