Sweden is in the online casino news again only this time the Scandinavian nation is not the one under the microscope. It appears the recent investigation into possible tax evasion has widened to include people who have won money on the internet through online gaming sites.

It seems the search for possible tax evaders involve people who wager online and their affiliates, meaning any company that has profited from these online players. These two groups of people are facing a potential back tax rate on any winnings as high as fifty-seven percent and that is coupled with severe penalties if the parties involved are to be found guilty. The National Economic Crimes Bureau and the Swedish Gaming Board have been working with the Skatteverket, which is the Scandinavian nation’s tax authority. For the past few months these three groups have been looking into online wagering, trying to make sure that Sweden is getting what it is entitled to. They have requested several major companies involved with gambling on the internet to provide them with information that could be useful in catching tax evaders.

If the companies that Sweden is investigating are not based on Swedish soil then the country has no authority to claim any taxes from them, but as it turns out it seems that most of the alleged guilty parties are, in fact, based in Sweden. The Swedish media reports are stating that the marketing affiliates that are evading their taxes are responsible for some forty million dollars of the total due. The total due from the marketing affiliates and online players accused of tax evasion are allegedly guilty of an amount somewhere near sixty-six million dollars. One of these companies has all ready been named by the Skatteverket in November of last year. It is a Swedish based online poker site by the name of Multi Poker.com who owes the government just fewer than six and a half a million dollars.

It has been made clear that the National Economic Crimes Bureau, Swedish Gaming Board and Skatteverket have used this operation to seek after the Swedish Internet Infrastructure and domain providers asking them for confidential information including the ones that manage online poker clients. The investigators have reportedly been using Xenon web crawler technology to seek out and recognize any sites they feel meet the standards of withholding taxes.