Duel.com Banned in Sweden: What the Regulator Found
Sweden's gambling regulator, Spelinspektionen, has banned Duel's operator Immortal Snail LLC from offering gambling to Swedish players. The ban took effect on October 28, 2026. Duel's reply to the regulator was that Swedish is an international language and that Sweden should simply be IP-blocked, which a follow-up check found had not happened.
What Sweden decided
Spelinspektionen opened a supervisory case on suspicion that duel.com was offering gambling aimed at Sweden without a Swedish license. Its decision, reported as case 26Si2185, bans Immortal Snail LLC from offering gambling in Sweden with immediate effect. The regulator gave consumer protection as the reason for not waiting.
Duel has never held a Swedish license and is not trying to get one. It runs under an offshore license from Anjouan in the Comoros, which gives it no right to serve Swedish players. The question for the regulator was only whether Duel was targeting Sweden anyway.
What the regulator found
- Swedish was available as a site language.
- Swedish kronor (SEK) could be chosen as a currency.
- Nothing stopped people in Sweden from registering.
- Duel was being marketed in Swedish to people in Sweden.
An undercover test purchase was attempted and did not go through, according to Gambling News. The regulator did not need it to: the language, currency and marketing were enough to show the site was aimed at Sweden.
What Duel told the regulator
The decision quotes Immortal Snail's response, as reported by SBC News. The company said that Swedish is an international language and that Sweden as a country should be IP-blocked. It said it cannot control whether payments are made in SEK. And it said it should not have to stop offering Swedish on the website.
When Spelinspektionen checked again on October 28, the IP block had not been put in place. Swedish kronor and the Swedish language still appeared for visitors on a Swedish IP address, and the regulator noted that Swedish-language marketing of duel.com was continuing.
We have not found a public statement from Duel about the decision.
Can Sweden enforce it?
Not easily. Immortal Snail is registered in Nevis and has no Swedish license to take away, no Swedish office and, as far as anyone has reported, no assets in Sweden. That is the point trade press made as soon as the ban came out.
Swedish law does give the regulator other tools against unlicensed operators, including ordering payment providers to stop processing their transactions. Spelinspektionen has not said whether it will use them against Duel. For now the practical effect is that offering gambling to Swedes is formally illegal, and Duel is on record refusing part of what the regulator asked.
What it means for players
In Sweden: you should not be playing at Duel. Beyond the ban itself, an unlicensed site is outside Spelpaus, the national self-exclusion register, and outside any Swedish complaints process. Gambling winnings from companies outside the EU/EEA are also taxable in Sweden, unlike winnings from licensed Swedish operators.
Everywhere else: nothing changes. Duel's Anjouan license is unaffected, and the regulator's validator still showed it as valid on November 4, 2026. The ban is still worth knowing about, because it shows how Duel deals with a regulator when asked to change something: it argued rather than complied. Who runs the company and what else is going on around it is covered in who owns Duel.
FAQ
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Sources: SBC News, Gambling News, Gambling Insider. We have not seen the full text of Spelinspektionen's decision; quotes are as published by these outlets.