Veikkaus, Finland’s state-owned gambling company, will launch a new consumer brand called Viabet in both Finland and Denmark on 1 July 2027, marking its first direct-to-consumer venture outside its home market.

The brand is being built in partnership with streaming and sports broadcaster Viaplay Group. Viabet will be developed, owned and operated by Veikkaus, which will run it through its international arm, while Viaplay will supply selected media content, according to reports by Finnish public broadcaster Yle and the trade press.

“Viabet is a significant strategic step for Veikkaus,” president and chief executive Olli Sarekoski said, as reported by Yle.

Timed to the end of the monopoly

The launch date is no coincidence. On 1 July 2027 Finland opens its online gambling market to licensed competitors, ending the exclusive position Veikkaus has held for decades. The company will keep its own Veikkaus-branded products, but Viabet gives it a second, media-led brand to compete with international operators arriving in the market.

Those rivals are already lining up. Wildz Group said earlier this month that it was the first company to win a Finnish online gambling licence, and ComeOn and SuomiVeto have since joined the first group of licensed operators. Supplier deals are also being signed, with sportsbook providers announcing partnerships timed for the July 2027 opening.

The Finnish reform splits the old monopoly in two. Online casino and betting will be open to licensed private operators, while Veikkaus keeps exclusive rights over lotteries and land-based slot machines. Licensed operators will pay a gaming tax on their Finnish revenue and face marketing rules overseen by the new licensing authority, so Viabet will compete on the same terms as the international brands.

Until now, Veikkaus’s activity outside Finland has been concentrated in its B2B subsidiary Fennica Gaming. Viabet is the first time it will face customers directly in another regulated market.

Why Denmark

Denmark is a natural first target. Viaplay has a large sports audience there and holds key football rights: in April it said it had extended its men’s Champions League rights in Denmark for four years from autumn 2027 to 2031. A betting brand that can sit alongside that content gives Veikkaus a route to customers without building awareness from scratch.

The Danish market, regulated by Spillemyndigheden, is also mature and competitive, with a long list of licensed international operators. Neither company has said whether Veikkaus has applied for a Danish licence, which it will need before Viabet can take bets there.

Advertising rules in flux

The timing brings a regulatory complication. The Danish government has tabled a bill that would introduce a whistle-to-whistle gambling advertising ban and new curbs on affiliates. The proposed restrictions are due to apply from 1 July 2027, subject to parliamentary approval, the same day Viabet is meant to go live.

A tighter advertising regime around live sport could limit how far a broadcaster-linked brand can use match coverage to promote betting, which is a large part of the logic of a media partnership. How the final Danish rules treat sponsorship and in-programme promotion will matter for Viabet’s launch plans.

A hedge abroad

For Veikkaus, which is losing its online monopoly at home, finding revenue in a neighbouring regulated market is a hedge against the market share it is likely to cede to new Finnish licensees.

The deal will also be watched by other broadcasters weighing whether to move from selling betting advertising to holding a stake in a betting brand. Further details on Viabet’s product range and supplier line-up are expected closer to launch.

Utah has filed criminal charges against prediction market operator Kalshi and its co-founders, chief executive Tarek Mansour and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara, escalating the state’s fight over whether sports event contracts are illegal gambling.

Attorney General Derek Brown filed 14 counts in state court in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, according to the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune and Reuters. The complaint lists one count of pattern of unlawful activity, a second-degree felony, 12 counts of online gambling promotion, each a third-degree felony, and one count of general gambling promotion. Local reports differ on whether the last count is charged as a misdemeanour or a felony.

“Gambling is illegal in Utah, whether you place the bet, run the game, or promote it,” Brown said, according to the Deseret News.

Undercover bets on local teams

The charges rest on an undercover investigation. Charging documents say a state investigator opened a Kalshi account on 13 September using an undercover name, a Visa debit card, a local phone number and a bank account identifying him as a Utah resident. Over 11 days he placed around a dozen wagers on NFL and MLB games, the Utah versus Utah State college football game and a Real Salt Lake match.

The wagers totalled $114.87 and the investigator finished $25.10 down, according to reports of the filing. One example cited was a $5 spread contract on Utah beating Utah State by more than 27.5 points, which paid $4.13 when Utah won by 36. Prosecutors say Kalshi took a fee of between three and 78 cents on each transaction.

Kalshi rejected the case. “This is a crazy overreach; Utah is clearly playing politics,” a company spokesperson said. Kalshi maintains that its contracts are federally regulated derivatives traded on a CFTC-designated exchange, not gambling.

A fast-moving three-way fight

The criminal complaint is the third major development in Utah in little more than a week. On 20 October the state sued Kalshi in civil court, calling its markets a public nuisance. That 63-page complaint alleges the company earned between $30.5m and $61.1m from Utah accounts between February and mid-October and seeks to stop it operating in the state.

On Tuesday the federal government hit back, with the CFTC and the Department of Justice suing Utah to block enforcement of its gambling laws against event contracts. That complaint argues the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction over derivatives traded on federally regulated exchanges and that federal law preempts state gambling statutes. Utah filed its criminal charges the following day.

Utah enters the criminal phase with a federal ruling on its side. In August, US District Judge Robert Shelby held that the state’s anti-gambling laws apply to Kalshi’s sports contracts and are not preempted by the federal statute the company relied on. That reasoning cuts against a separate federal decision in Arizona, where prosecutors brought criminal charges against Kalshi in March on a similar theory only for a federal judge to block the case in May. Arizona is appealing.

Why it matters

Naming individual executives raises the stakes well beyond fines or cease-and-desist orders, and it lands while dozens of states argue that the CFTC lacks authority over sports event contracts. New Jersey has already asked the US Supreme Court to settle which level of government has jurisdiction.

For licensed sportsbooks, several of which are building their own prediction products, the Utah case is a test of how far states are prepared to go. The next steps are the federal court’s response to the CFTC’s request to halt Utah’s enforcement and the first hearing in the criminal case, neither of which had been scheduled at the time of writing.

The Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) has concluded that low numbers of suspicious betting reports from some of its licensees largely reflect tight risk controls rather than a failure to spot match-fixing, although it found gaps in how many of those firms document escalation and reporting.

The findings come from a thematic review of sports betting integrity monitoring, escalation and controls, which the regulator published on 27 October. The review targeted authorised persons that had filed few or no Suspicious Betting Reports since Malta’s reporting requirements were introduced. Those obligations applied to B2C licensees from 2021 and were extended to B2B licensees supplying critical gaming services in October that year.

Scope and method

According to the full report, the MGA examined a risk-based sample of authorised persons covering both B2B and B2C operating models. The regulator did not disclose how many licensees were included. The fieldwork ran from the second quarter to the fourth quarter of 2025 and drew on supervisory meetings, documents submitted by the firms and follow-up clarifications. All findings are presented in anonymised and aggregated form.

The exercise was flagged in the MGA’s February 2025 supervisory engagement plan and sits within its wider programme of reviewing the controls that support sports betting integrity.

Low volumes explained

The regulator found that many of the firms reviewed operated restrictive betting limits, conservative market offerings and removed events judged especially vulnerable to manipulation, such as certain youth competitions. These measures, it said, substantially reduced exposure to integrity risk and the likelihood of suspicious activity arising in the first place.

The report concluded that low reporting volumes “reflected the underlying risk management processes and reliance on external monitoring, rather than a simple absence of detection capability.”

That reliance on third parties was itself a weakness. Many licensees depended on external integrity monitoring bodies and only opened internal investigations when a partner raised an alert, meaning suspicious activity was less likely to be caught if no alert arrived. B2B-integrated operators often relied on feeds from their upstream providers, so the depth of their monitoring depended on that supplier. The MGA also found that some multi-jurisdiction operators did not realise that suspicious activity spotted mainly under foreign licences had to be reported to Malta where the same market involved MGA-licensed players.

Documentation gaps

All firms had some form of internal escalation process, typically starting in trading or risk teams before moving to compliance for a reporting decision. But the level of formality varied widely. Several policies made insufficient reference to the role of the Key Compliance Function, and some firms described their escalation flows verbally in meetings without capturing them in written procedures. Documents sometimes lacked detail on the duty to report within set timeframes regardless of whether financial harm had occurred, and did not always reflect staff training or market suspension practices.

The MGA said it had requested revisions so that written procedures match operational reality. It also advised firms to ensure internal teams have sufficient access to betting data even where services are provided by B2B partners, and to combine system alerts with human oversight.

On athlete betting, the regulator found licensees used external databases, manual checks and targeted account restrictions to stop athletes and sports staff betting on their own sport. None of the sampled firms had formal agreements or memoranda of understanding with sports governing bodies, which the MGA does not require but said could add value.

Industry asks for clearer definitions

Licensees told the regulator that the lack of clear guidance on what counts as “suspicious” betting leaves them to set their own standards, risking inconsistent reporting. The MGA acknowledged the feedback but said it prefers an open approach, arguing that rigid thresholds could discourage firms from submitting information that still warrants review. Firms also floated a centralised register of professional athletes. The MGA said this falls outside its remit but that sports associations may wish to explore it, while noting accuracy and data protection hurdles.

The review follows a separate MGA thematic review of the local football betting market published in October 2025. The regulator said it will track progress through ongoing supervision and take the findings into account when shaping future guidance, leaving the definition of suspicious activity as an open question for operators to watch.