A unit of Fanduel-owner Flutter Entertainment Plc illegally collected the data of a gambling-addicted customer to profile him for marketing purposes online, a London judge ruled.

Bonne Terre Ltd., operating as Sky Betting and Gaming, breached UK data protection law when it collected the anonymous claimant’s data through cookies without sufficient consent and used it to send personalized direct marketing messages between 2017 and 2019, according to a High Court judgment on Thursday.

“Hopefully this judgment will reduce harm to vulnerable people by serving as a warning to online gambling companies,” said Ravi Naik, a lawyer at data rights agency AWO, who represented the claimant.

The way gambling operators profile and target customers has attracted the attention of regulators in recent years, as part of a broader effort to reduce gambling harms. In the UK, there has been increasing pressure on policymakers to crack down on gambling advertising over concerns that it is contributing to a public health crisis.

“We fundamentally disagree with this judgment and will be considering an appeal,” said a spokesperson for Sky Betting and Gaming. “We have made significant changes to our controls and processes over the past six years as part of our ongoing investment behind safer gambling and will continue to do so.”

The claimant in the High Court case lost more than £45,000 ($55,388) gambling with Sky Betting and Gaming over almost 10 years, according to Naik. He argued that Sky Betting and Gaming ought to have known he was a problem gambler and illegally shared his data with third parties. The judge noted that the decision was confined to the particular circumstances of the case and that the industry’s policies and practices have evolved since the period in question.

“This case gives us a little window into one operator’s processes but this appears to be normal practice by all licensed online gambling operators in Britain,” said Will Prochaska, director of the Coalition to End Gambling Ads. “We’ve seen far too many instances of people being hounded by gambling operators when it’s obvious to anybody that their losses are unaffordable and causing them harm.”

Sky Betting and Gaming was previously reprimanded by the UK data regulator for unlawfully processing people’s data. In September the Information Commissioner’s Office said that the company was sharing people’s personal information with advertising technology companies without their prior knowledge or consent during a three-month period in 2023.

The UK’s Gambling Commission also fined the company £1.17 million in 2022 for sending promotional emails to customers who had self-excluded — a mechanism that allows problem gamblers to ask operators to block them from making bets — or opted out of receiving marketing.

Sky Betting and Gaming said it carries out financial vulnerability checks and places deposit limits on customers who return after a period of self-exclusion.

Photo: Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

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