- The AGCO ordered $120,000 in penalties after nine people under 19 deposited and gambled on Betty.ca.
- Fourteen more underage individuals opened accounts without depositing, and those registrations breach the standard on their own.
- Betty Gaming spotted the flaw itself, and the AGCO learned of it in November 2025.
- Betty Gaming has 15 days to appeal the order to Ontario’s Licence Appeal Tribunal.
TORONTO – The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario ordered $120,000 in monetary penalties against Betty Gaming Ltd. after a defect in Betty.ca’s age-verification controls let nine people below Ontario’s minimum age of 19 register, fund an account and place bets.
The Breach Begins At Registration, Not At The Bet
The AGCO cited two sections of the Registrar’s Standards for Gaming. One, section 3.01, requirement 1(a), forbids an operator from letting anyone underage register, sign in or wager online. The other, section 3.04, puts the validation duty at the front of the process, requiring an operator to capture player information at signup and prove it accurate before the account exists.
That second standard is what makes the case larger than the nine funded accounts. Fourteen additional underage individuals registered on Betty.ca without depositing anything, and section 3.04 attaches the validation duty at account creation. A registration that never produced a deposit or a wager still counts against the operator.
Betty.ca is one of the Ontario gambling sites registered with the AGCO and operating under agreement with iGaming Ontario. Ontario sets 19 as the minimum gambling age, and the province runs the largest regulated market among online gambling sites for Canadians.
The Registrar’s Line Is That Systems Must Work Before Launch
Betty Gaming found the vulnerability in its own player-eligibility controls on Betty.ca. Word reached the AGCO in November 2025, and the regulator published the order roughly nine months later.
Karin Schnarr, the AGCO’s chief executive officer and registrar, tied the failure to testing done before a system reaches players rather than to what an operator finds afterward.
Operators, Schnarr said, are “responsible for making sure their systems work before those systems go live.”
Self-identification did not spare Betty Gaming the penalty.
Ontario’s Other Underage Case Was A Land-Based One
Age verification has drawn AGCO penalties before, in venues rather than on a signup form.
In May 2025 the regulator issued $151,000 in penalties against Great Canadian Entertainment over four incidents in which minors reached gaming floors, split as $51,000 at Great Canadian Casino Resort Toronto and $50,000 each at Casino Ajax and Pickering Casino Resort.
The Betty Gaming order moves that category of failure from a door check to a codebase, and puts a published figure on it at $120,000 across 23 underage accounts. It extends a 2026 run of penalties from Ontario’s gambling watchdog that has reached game suppliers and casino groups as well as online sites, including a five-day registration suspension.
What Happens Next
Betty Gaming has 15 days to appeal to the Licence Appeal Tribunal, an adjudicative body within Tribunals Ontario that is independent of the AGCO. Until that window closes or the tribunal rules, the $120,000 stands as issued rather than final.
