Image credit: Source: Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario. Never imply stock depicts the actual event.
Ontario's gaming regulator fined Betty Gaming CA$120,000 on 6 August after a flaw in Betty.ca's age-verification controls let 23 underage users create accounts, with 9 of them depositing money and gambling before the operator shut the loophole. The Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario said Betty first spotted the defect itself, in November 2025, and reported it before the regulator came calling.
Nine account holders under Ontario's legal gambling age of 19 deposited funds and placed bets. Fourteen more registered but never funded their accounts. The AGCO cited two breaches of its Registrar's Standards for Gaming: section 3.01, which bars operators from letting anyone underage create an account, log in or gamble, and section 3.04, which requires that player information be collected and validated before an account goes live, not after.
"The legal age requirement is one of the most basic and important safeguards in Ontario's regulated gaming market," said Dr. Karin Schnarr, the AGCO's chief executive and registrar. "Young people must not be able to create accounts, deposit money, or gamble online."
The penalty lands in a market the AGCO has patrolled hard all year. The regulator flagged the same gap in self-exclusion coverage that Betty's incident now echoes from a different angle: controls that work as designed inside one province's rulebook still depend entirely on the operator building them correctly the first time. Betty itself is mid-expansion, having extended its casino brand into Alberta on 4 August through a new Playson supply deal as Alberta's market opened to private operators this summer. The AGCO's action concerns Betty's existing Ontario licence and does not touch the new Alberta launch, but it is a reminder that a self-reported defect in one province still costs real money once the regulator finishes its review, however promptly it was flagged.
The AGCO's release does not disclose what happened to the accounts of the nine underage users who deposited and gambled, beyond confirming that Betty closed the affected accounts and added new safeguards once it found the problem. Operators expanding into new provinces this year face the same lesson: age gates get tested by real users, not just compliance checklists, and the AGCO is treating self-disclosure as a mitigating factor, not an exemption from the fine.