But thinking about it more, they both know they are in hot water right now with not only players, but the govt & those against DFS even before this happened, and know they better come together in a time of survival...
All of their funding is registered with the SEC and we know who the owners of both sites are.
The situation is how it looks. Nothing less, nothing more.
Random tidbit: I actually met this Ethan kid a few yrs back. Seemed like a nice guy, I don't really think he was trying to do anything shady. I blame the sites for not realizing the industry isn't in it's infancy anymore and not seeing a problem like this coming. FD employees shouldn't be allowed to play on DK and vice versa.
The situation is how it looks. Nothing less, nothing more.
Random tidbit: I actually met this Ethan kid a few yrs back. Seemed like a nice guy, I don't really think he was trying to do anything shady. I blame the sites for not realizing the industry isn't in it's infancy anymore and not seeing a problem like this coming. FD employees shouldn't be allowed to play on DK and vice versa.
True
But it's time for regulation plain & simple.
Like I and others have said, nothing stops any of them from entering their own lineups late, editing lineups, or even faking thousands of entries...
Regulation is almost never a good idea. If you allow the gov't to F something up, then they probably will.
But there does need to be some type of oversight and transparency.
One thing is for sure in the USA...if an industry doesn't police itself, then you better be sure the Gov't will.
They did it to themselves. I could've told them this dilemma would arise eventually. Although I didn't see it unfolding this way. Only reason it got brought to the forefront is because Ethan was dumb enough to post ownership %s before games started. F'n idiot.
But there does need to be some type of oversight and transparency.
One thing is for sure in the USA...if an industry doesn't police itself, then you better be sure the Gov't will.
They did it to themselves. I could've told them this dilemma would arise eventually. Although I didn't see it unfolding this way. Only reason it got brought to the forefront is because Ethan was dumb enough to post ownership %s before games started. F'n idiot.
I was gonna say I wonder if FD would tell Ethan they aren't paying him because of all the controversy.
No way would that holdup in court. Site policy allows employees of other sites to play and also the big win was from last week. He probably had a check written immediately. I would think he possesses the actual money right now.
No way would that holdup in court. Site policy allows employees of other sites to play and also the big win was from last week. He probably had a check written immediately. I would think he possesses the actual money right now.
Well we don't want it to be illegal.
But they just increased those odds a lot.
Maybe this is how it all goes down in helping both fantasy & sportsbetting get legalized officially everywhere.
At least in sports betting it's pretty simple.
You pick a play and wait for the results.
Nothing fishy can happen with sports betting...
Scandal Erupts in Unregulated World of Fantasy Sports
NYTimes
By JOE DRAPE and JACQUELINE WILLIAMS
OCTOBER 5, 2015
A major scandal is erupting in the multibillion-dollar industry of fantasy sports, the online and unregulated business in which players assemble their fantasy teams with real athletes. On Monday, the two major fantasy companies were forced to release statements defending their businesses’ integrity after what amounted to allegations of insider trading, that employees were placing bets using information not available to the public.
Last week, a DraftKings employee admitted to inadvertently releasing data before the start of the third week of N.F.L. games, a move akin to insider trading in the stock market. The employee — a midlevel content manager — won $350,000 at rival site FanDuel that same week.
The incident has raised questions about who at daily fantasy companies has access to valuable data, how it is protected and whether the industry can — or wants — to police itself.
The leagues have been swelling in popularity, their advertisements blanketing football game broadcasts.
The industry has its roots in informal fantasy games that began years ago with groups of fans playing against each other for fun over the course of a season. They assembled hypothetical teams and scored points based on how players did in actual games.
But in recent years, companies, led by DraftKings and FanDuel, have set up online daily and weekly games in which fans pay an entry fee to a website — anywhere from 25 cents to $1,000 — to play dozens if not hundreds of opponents, with prize pools that can pay $2 million to the winner. Critics have complained that the setup is hardly different from Las Vegas-style gambling that is normally banned in the sports world.
On Monday, DraftKings and FanDuel released a joint statement that said that “nothing is more important” than the “integrity of the games we offer,” but offered few specifics about how they keep their contests on the level.
A spokesman for DraftKings acknowledged that employees of both companies have won big jackpots playing at other daily fantasy sites. Late Monday, the two companies temporarily banned their employees from playing games or in tournaments at any other site; they already had prohibited their employees from playing on their own company sites.
“Both companies have strong policies in place to ensure that employees do not misuse any information at their disposal and strictly limit access to company data to only those employees who require it to do their jobs,” the statement said. “Employees with access to this data are rigorously monitored by internal fraud control teams, and we have no evidence that anyone has misused it.”
Industry analysts said the episode could leave the leagues open to further criticism that they are too loosely regulated.
“The single greatest threat to the daily fantasy sports industry is the misuse of insider information,” said Daniel Wallach, a sports and gambling lawyer at Becker & Poliakoff in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It could imperil this nascent industry unless real, immediate and meaningful safeguards are put in place. If the industry is unwilling to undertake these reforms voluntarily, it will be imposed on them involuntarily as part of a regulatory framework.”
Already, there has been intensifying discussion on social media and among lawmakers over whether daily fantasy games are pushing the boundaries of an exemption in a 2006 federal law that has allowed them to operate. The law prohibited games like online poker but permitted fantasy play, deemed games of skill not chance, under lobbying from professional sports leagues. The games are legal in all but five states.
But because Congress did not foresee how fantasy sports would explode, one member, Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, recently requested a hearing to explore the relationship between fantasy sports and gambling. “I really think if they had to justify themselves at a hearing they wouldn’t be able to,” Mr. Pallone said in a recent interview.
The data that DraftKings acknowledged was released by its employee, Ethan Haskell, showed what particular players were most used in all lineups submitted to the site’s Millionaire Maker contests. Usually, that data is not released until the lineups for all games are finalized. Getting it early, however, is of great advantage to make tactical decisions, especially when your opponents do not have the information at all.
A spokeswoman for DraftKings said Haskell simply made a mistake and that the company was certain that he did not use the information improperly. She declined to go into specifics about the safeguards or the company’s auditing policies.
Representatives of both companies acknowledged that many employees of daily fantasy companies were players first and had continued to compete on other sites. Ben Brown, a co-founder of Daily Fantasy Sports Report, was first to disclose that Haskell had posted the information.
“There’s a significant amount of crossover,” said Chris Grove, an industry analyst and editor of legalsportsreport.com. “The nature of the industry is so specialized and so new that, at the speed which they grew, they relied heavily on the player population.”
Many of these employees set the prices of players and the algorithms for scoring. In short, they make the market.
As daily fantasy sports has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry in the past year, DraftKings and FanDuel have become a cherished sponsor of M.L.B. and N.F.L. franchises.
Eilers Research, which studies the industry, estimates that daily games will generate around $2.6 billion in entry fees this year and grow 41 percent annually, reaching $14.4 billion in 2020. So high are the potential financial rewards that DraftKings and FanDuel have found eager partners in N.F.L. teams, even as league executives remain staunch opponents of sports betting.
Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Robert K. Kraft of the New England Patriots have stakes in DraftKings and the company recently struck a three-year deal with the N.F.L. to become a partner of the league’s International Series in Great Britain, where sports betting is legal. In addition, DraftKings has tapped hundreds of millions from Fox Sports, and FanDuel has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like Comcast, NBC and KKR.
Adam Krejcik, a managing director at Eilers Research, said early missteps are often part of booming growth in a new and often misunderstood sector like daily fantasy sports. He said whether Haskell, the DraftKings employee, made an innocent mistake or not the damage is done.
“Certainly does not look good from an optics standpoint and it strengthens the case for additional oversight and regulation,” he said.
Grove, of legalsportsreport.com, said this may be a watershed moment for a sector that has resisted regulation but now may need it to prove its legitimacy.
“You have information that is valuable and should be tightly restricted,” Grove said. “There are people outside of the company that place value on that information. Is there any internal controls? Any audit process? The inability of the industry to produce a clear and compelling answer to these questions to anyone’s satisfaction is why it needs to be regulated.”
NYTimes
By JOE DRAPE and JACQUELINE WILLIAMS
OCTOBER 5, 2015
A major scandal is erupting in the multibillion-dollar industry of fantasy sports, the online and unregulated business in which players assemble their fantasy teams with real athletes. On Monday, the two major fantasy companies were forced to release statements defending their businesses’ integrity after what amounted to allegations of insider trading, that employees were placing bets using information not available to the public.
Last week, a DraftKings employee admitted to inadvertently releasing data before the start of the third week of N.F.L. games, a move akin to insider trading in the stock market. The employee — a midlevel content manager — won $350,000 at rival site FanDuel that same week.
The incident has raised questions about who at daily fantasy companies has access to valuable data, how it is protected and whether the industry can — or wants — to police itself.
The leagues have been swelling in popularity, their advertisements blanketing football game broadcasts.
The industry has its roots in informal fantasy games that began years ago with groups of fans playing against each other for fun over the course of a season. They assembled hypothetical teams and scored points based on how players did in actual games.
But in recent years, companies, led by DraftKings and FanDuel, have set up online daily and weekly games in which fans pay an entry fee to a website — anywhere from 25 cents to $1,000 — to play dozens if not hundreds of opponents, with prize pools that can pay $2 million to the winner. Critics have complained that the setup is hardly different from Las Vegas-style gambling that is normally banned in the sports world.
On Monday, DraftKings and FanDuel released a joint statement that said that “nothing is more important” than the “integrity of the games we offer,” but offered few specifics about how they keep their contests on the level.
A spokesman for DraftKings acknowledged that employees of both companies have won big jackpots playing at other daily fantasy sites. Late Monday, the two companies temporarily banned their employees from playing games or in tournaments at any other site; they already had prohibited their employees from playing on their own company sites.
“Both companies have strong policies in place to ensure that employees do not misuse any information at their disposal and strictly limit access to company data to only those employees who require it to do their jobs,” the statement said. “Employees with access to this data are rigorously monitored by internal fraud control teams, and we have no evidence that anyone has misused it.”
Industry analysts said the episode could leave the leagues open to further criticism that they are too loosely regulated.
“The single greatest threat to the daily fantasy sports industry is the misuse of insider information,” said Daniel Wallach, a sports and gambling lawyer at Becker & Poliakoff in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “It could imperil this nascent industry unless real, immediate and meaningful safeguards are put in place. If the industry is unwilling to undertake these reforms voluntarily, it will be imposed on them involuntarily as part of a regulatory framework.”
Already, there has been intensifying discussion on social media and among lawmakers over whether daily fantasy games are pushing the boundaries of an exemption in a 2006 federal law that has allowed them to operate. The law prohibited games like online poker but permitted fantasy play, deemed games of skill not chance, under lobbying from professional sports leagues. The games are legal in all but five states.
But because Congress did not foresee how fantasy sports would explode, one member, Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, recently requested a hearing to explore the relationship between fantasy sports and gambling. “I really think if they had to justify themselves at a hearing they wouldn’t be able to,” Mr. Pallone said in a recent interview.
The data that DraftKings acknowledged was released by its employee, Ethan Haskell, showed what particular players were most used in all lineups submitted to the site’s Millionaire Maker contests. Usually, that data is not released until the lineups for all games are finalized. Getting it early, however, is of great advantage to make tactical decisions, especially when your opponents do not have the information at all.
A spokeswoman for DraftKings said Haskell simply made a mistake and that the company was certain that he did not use the information improperly. She declined to go into specifics about the safeguards or the company’s auditing policies.
Representatives of both companies acknowledged that many employees of daily fantasy companies were players first and had continued to compete on other sites. Ben Brown, a co-founder of Daily Fantasy Sports Report, was first to disclose that Haskell had posted the information.
“There’s a significant amount of crossover,” said Chris Grove, an industry analyst and editor of legalsportsreport.com. “The nature of the industry is so specialized and so new that, at the speed which they grew, they relied heavily on the player population.”
Many of these employees set the prices of players and the algorithms for scoring. In short, they make the market.
As daily fantasy sports has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry in the past year, DraftKings and FanDuel have become a cherished sponsor of M.L.B. and N.F.L. franchises.
Eilers Research, which studies the industry, estimates that daily games will generate around $2.6 billion in entry fees this year and grow 41 percent annually, reaching $14.4 billion in 2020. So high are the potential financial rewards that DraftKings and FanDuel have found eager partners in N.F.L. teams, even as league executives remain staunch opponents of sports betting.
Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Robert K. Kraft of the New England Patriots have stakes in DraftKings and the company recently struck a three-year deal with the N.F.L. to become a partner of the league’s International Series in Great Britain, where sports betting is legal. In addition, DraftKings has tapped hundreds of millions from Fox Sports, and FanDuel has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like Comcast, NBC and KKR.
Adam Krejcik, a managing director at Eilers Research, said early missteps are often part of booming growth in a new and often misunderstood sector like daily fantasy sports. He said whether Haskell, the DraftKings employee, made an innocent mistake or not the damage is done.
“Certainly does not look good from an optics standpoint and it strengthens the case for additional oversight and regulation,” he said.
Grove, of legalsportsreport.com, said this may be a watershed moment for a sector that has resisted regulation but now may need it to prove its legitimacy.
“You have information that is valuable and should be tightly restricted,” Grove said. “There are people outside of the company that place value on that information. Is there any internal controls? Any audit process? The inability of the industry to produce a clear and compelling answer to these questions to anyone’s satisfaction is why it needs to be regulated.”
(Article is in response to NYTimes article in above post)
5 THINGS THE NEW YORK TIMES GOT WRONG IN TODAY’S EDITORIAL ON FANTASY SPORTS & GAMBLING
American Gaming Association
PRESS RELEASE | 10.05.2015
Washington, DC - The New York Times missed the mark in five important areas of today’s editorial (“Rein in Online Fantasy Sports Gambling”), which seemingly calls on the federal government to ban popular fantasy sports activities.
#1: New York Times fails to mention the proven benefits of regulation.
Prohibition on sports betting is a massive failure. Americans are finding limitless ways to spend billions of dollars illegally to gamble on professional and amateur sporting events. In the unregulated market, integrity cannot be guaranteed and dollars often fund criminal enterprises. Yet this seems to be exactly what the New York Times – which makes not a single mention of regulation – is promoting. More big-government dictates on what games Americans can and cannot consume is destined to fail.
#2: “This boom has grown because the UIGEA of 2006, which prevented payment processors from working with gambling websites, included an exemption for fantasy sports.”
Actually, the boom is directly tied to tremendous public demand and antiquated, ineffective laws like the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992 that prohibits sports wagering largely outside of Nevada.
Sports fans will wager $95 billion on NFL and college football games this season, according to an AGA estimate released last month. The vast majority – $93 billion – of wagers will be placed illegally. Just under $2 billion will be wagered at sports books in Nevada. On last season’s Super Bowl alone, Americans made $3.8 billion worth of illicit bets – an amount 38 times greater than the total bet legally.
Americans are clamoring to engage with their favorite sporting activities in an interactive way, and daily fantasy sports creators have tapped into that demand.
#3: “Because daily and weekly fantasy games are so new, there are very few studies on whether they are addictive and result in the social problems typically associated with gambling.”
Across 40 states, casino gaming contributes $240 billion annually to America’s economy, supports 1.7 million jobs and generates $38 billion in tax revenues in support of education and other important areas, according to Oxford Economics.
Adam Sacks, who conducted the Oxford study, described gaming as “a vast industry that boosts local communities across the country by supporting jobs and generating customers for businesses.”
Further, even as the industry has expanded to operate in 40 states, problem gambling rates have stayed steady. According to a decade-long study conducted by the University of Buffalo, “despite an increase in gambling opportunities, rates of problem gambling remained stable.”
#4: “The allure of profits from gambling clouds otherwise rational minds.”
Policymakers and voters who decide to bring casino gaming to their state understand the many benefits the industry provides. In Las Vegas and in communities beyond Nevada, casinos serve as a potent catalyst to attract new businesses and bolster existing ones. Residents, elected officials, police chiefs, small businesses, non-profit executives and others typically associate casinos with good jobs, strong partnerships, much-needed tax revenue, millions of dollars in charitable giving and a fun entertainment experience. Just ask folks in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Columbus, Ohio; or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Moreover, typical casino visitors defy stereotypes. Most are between the ages of 21 and 59, and a plurality earns $60,000 to $99,000 a year. They’re also well-educated, churchgoing voters who contribute to their communities. And when they visit a casino, most set a budget of less than $200.
#5: “Giving people more ways to bet on the outcomes of sports is sure to threaten the integrity of sports and create more gambling addicts, especially among young people who are already more likely to engage in risky behaviors.”
Illegal sports betting – which is running rampant across the country and has grown exponentially since a federal law banned it in nearly every state in 1992 – poses a significant threat to the integrity of sporting events. In contrast, in Nevada, where sports betting is regulated, sports books at casinos have notified the FBI of unusual betting activity on sporting events that have led to convictions on match fixing. Increasingly, progressive sports leagues are turning to regulation as the best means of protecting the integrity of sports.
About AGA: The American Gaming Association is the premier national trade group representing the $240 billion U.S casino industry, which supports 1.7 million jobs in 40 states. AGA members include commercial and tribal casino operators, suppliers and other entities affiliated with the gaming industry. It is the mission of the AGA to be the single most effective champion of the industry, relentlessly protecting against harmful and often misinformed public policies, and paving a path for growth, innovation and reinvestment.
5 THINGS THE NEW YORK TIMES GOT WRONG IN TODAY’S EDITORIAL ON FANTASY SPORTS & GAMBLING
American Gaming Association
PRESS RELEASE | 10.05.2015
Washington, DC - The New York Times missed the mark in five important areas of today’s editorial (“Rein in Online Fantasy Sports Gambling”), which seemingly calls on the federal government to ban popular fantasy sports activities.
#1: New York Times fails to mention the proven benefits of regulation.
Prohibition on sports betting is a massive failure. Americans are finding limitless ways to spend billions of dollars illegally to gamble on professional and amateur sporting events. In the unregulated market, integrity cannot be guaranteed and dollars often fund criminal enterprises. Yet this seems to be exactly what the New York Times – which makes not a single mention of regulation – is promoting. More big-government dictates on what games Americans can and cannot consume is destined to fail.
#2: “This boom has grown because the UIGEA of 2006, which prevented payment processors from working with gambling websites, included an exemption for fantasy sports.”
Actually, the boom is directly tied to tremendous public demand and antiquated, ineffective laws like the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992 that prohibits sports wagering largely outside of Nevada.
Sports fans will wager $95 billion on NFL and college football games this season, according to an AGA estimate released last month. The vast majority – $93 billion – of wagers will be placed illegally. Just under $2 billion will be wagered at sports books in Nevada. On last season’s Super Bowl alone, Americans made $3.8 billion worth of illicit bets – an amount 38 times greater than the total bet legally.
Americans are clamoring to engage with their favorite sporting activities in an interactive way, and daily fantasy sports creators have tapped into that demand.
#3: “Because daily and weekly fantasy games are so new, there are very few studies on whether they are addictive and result in the social problems typically associated with gambling.”
Across 40 states, casino gaming contributes $240 billion annually to America’s economy, supports 1.7 million jobs and generates $38 billion in tax revenues in support of education and other important areas, according to Oxford Economics.
Adam Sacks, who conducted the Oxford study, described gaming as “a vast industry that boosts local communities across the country by supporting jobs and generating customers for businesses.”
Further, even as the industry has expanded to operate in 40 states, problem gambling rates have stayed steady. According to a decade-long study conducted by the University of Buffalo, “despite an increase in gambling opportunities, rates of problem gambling remained stable.”
#4: “The allure of profits from gambling clouds otherwise rational minds.”
Policymakers and voters who decide to bring casino gaming to their state understand the many benefits the industry provides. In Las Vegas and in communities beyond Nevada, casinos serve as a potent catalyst to attract new businesses and bolster existing ones. Residents, elected officials, police chiefs, small businesses, non-profit executives and others typically associate casinos with good jobs, strong partnerships, much-needed tax revenue, millions of dollars in charitable giving and a fun entertainment experience. Just ask folks in Council Bluffs, Iowa; Columbus, Ohio; or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Moreover, typical casino visitors defy stereotypes. Most are between the ages of 21 and 59, and a plurality earns $60,000 to $99,000 a year. They’re also well-educated, churchgoing voters who contribute to their communities. And when they visit a casino, most set a budget of less than $200.
#5: “Giving people more ways to bet on the outcomes of sports is sure to threaten the integrity of sports and create more gambling addicts, especially among young people who are already more likely to engage in risky behaviors.”
Illegal sports betting – which is running rampant across the country and has grown exponentially since a federal law banned it in nearly every state in 1992 – poses a significant threat to the integrity of sporting events. In contrast, in Nevada, where sports betting is regulated, sports books at casinos have notified the FBI of unusual betting activity on sporting events that have led to convictions on match fixing. Increasingly, progressive sports leagues are turning to regulation as the best means of protecting the integrity of sports.
About AGA: The American Gaming Association is the premier national trade group representing the $240 billion U.S casino industry, which supports 1.7 million jobs in 40 states. AGA members include commercial and tribal casino operators, suppliers and other entities affiliated with the gaming industry. It is the mission of the AGA to be the single most effective champion of the industry, relentlessly protecting against harmful and often misinformed public policies, and paving a path for growth, innovation and reinvestment.
[h=1]Why The Industry’s Reaction To The DraftKings Leak Is A Clarion Call For Immediate Regulation Of Daily Fantasy Sports[/h]
legalsportsreport.com
October 5, 2015
The nature of daily fantasy sports likely means that the industry fundamentally requires some form of external oversight to function sustainably.
That’s the conclusion I kept returning to as I talked to players, industry stakeholders, and the media this weekend about the recent data leak at DraftKings.
But after seeing the official reactions from DraftKings and FanDuel this morning, I realized that the industry doesn’t just require oversight as an academic matter. Rather, it is in desperate and immediate need of said oversight.
Why?
[h=2]Operators aren’t providing any answers[/h]Nowhere in the statements from FanDuel or DraftKings do we find a single concrete detailregarding:
In a regulated environment, the answers to all of the above questions would be available.
Would all the information be made available publicly, all the time? Not necessarily. But regulators would have the access, the resources, and the mandate to produce comprehensive, objective answers in situations where such answers were needed.
[h=2]Self-policing is undermining operator credibility[/h]Prior to the statements, the general attitude expressed on social media and discussion forums was that DFS operators are generally in a poor position to police themselves, for myriad reasons.
Anecdotally, that attitude has only hardened following the statements.
A self-regulatory environment is only tenable within the context of high transparency or high trust. Today’s statements appear to engender neither, strengthening the argument for immediate regulatory intervention.
[h=2]What about the operators that didn’t issue statements?[/h]DraftKings and FanDuel are the largest DFS operators by a significant margin. But that doesn’t mean that they are the only operators of significant size or volume.
There are dozens of other DFS operators, including platforms backed by Amaya, CBS, andYahoo.
What is their policy on data protection? On employees playing at other sites? On fraud prevention?
We don’t know. And the reason we don’t know is because there’s no central force articulating and enforcing minimum standards, no one entity that can credibly describe the state of the industry on these key issues.
Instead what we get is a delayed, ad hoc response from the industry to an existential threat. Worryingly, such a response strongly suggests that the industry also takes an ad hoc approach to self-policing.
That is simply an unacceptable status quo when millions of players will risk billions of dollars this year on games they’ve been told – but can’t be shown – are fair.
legalsportsreport.com
October 5, 2015
The nature of daily fantasy sports likely means that the industry fundamentally requires some form of external oversight to function sustainably.
That’s the conclusion I kept returning to as I talked to players, industry stakeholders, and the media this weekend about the recent data leak at DraftKings.
But after seeing the official reactions from DraftKings and FanDuel this morning, I realized that the industry doesn’t just require oversight as an academic matter. Rather, it is in desperate and immediate need of said oversight.
Why?
[h=2]Operators aren’t providing any answers[/h]Nowhere in the statements from FanDuel or DraftKings do we find a single concrete detailregarding:
- Company policy regarding employee access to data. How many employees have access? How often is it queried? How long does the company keep the logs of such queries?
- The breach that led to this conversation. While DraftKings co-founder Matt Kalish appears to have provided some secondhand details to RotoGrinders about Ethan Haskell’s inadvertent release of DK lineup data, neither statement offers any insight or clarity into what data Haskell had access to, when he had the data, to or how he was able to circumvent the internal policies referenced by the statements.
- The landscape leading up to this event. How many investigations has each site undertaken in the past year regarding the potential for fraud? What was the resolution of those investigations? How have the investigatory approach and the resources dedicated to said investigations evolved as the industry has grown into one where billions are wagered annually in the space of two years?
In a regulated environment, the answers to all of the above questions would be available.
Would all the information be made available publicly, all the time? Not necessarily. But regulators would have the access, the resources, and the mandate to produce comprehensive, objective answers in situations where such answers were needed.
[h=2]Self-policing is undermining operator credibility[/h]Prior to the statements, the general attitude expressed on social media and discussion forums was that DFS operators are generally in a poor position to police themselves, for myriad reasons.
Anecdotally, that attitude has only hardened following the statements.
A self-regulatory environment is only tenable within the context of high transparency or high trust. Today’s statements appear to engender neither, strengthening the argument for immediate regulatory intervention.
[h=2]What about the operators that didn’t issue statements?[/h]DraftKings and FanDuel are the largest DFS operators by a significant margin. But that doesn’t mean that they are the only operators of significant size or volume.
There are dozens of other DFS operators, including platforms backed by Amaya, CBS, andYahoo.
What is their policy on data protection? On employees playing at other sites? On fraud prevention?
We don’t know. And the reason we don’t know is because there’s no central force articulating and enforcing minimum standards, no one entity that can credibly describe the state of the industry on these key issues.
Instead what we get is a delayed, ad hoc response from the industry to an existential threat. Worryingly, such a response strongly suggests that the industry also takes an ad hoc approach to self-policing.
That is simply an unacceptable status quo when millions of players will risk billions of dollars this year on games they’ve been told – but can’t be shown – are fair.
+1 he def knew it was shady, he just knew it wasn't illegal or even against company policy, and could make a lot of money. Makes you wonder if the owners are as smart as people think they are.
Would seem to be quite short sighted on his part...to be very very kind. Others would use much more harsh terms to describe this move on his part. Why is he not just having his line-ups submitted by acquaintances suitably "distanced" from himself like all the other guys within DF and FD who have access to (and are using) this info are? To get their lineups set? Without this being able to be traced to themselves?
Oh. I'd have expected there were rules against those with access to such info playing at other sites. Not that this would prevent them from doing so of course but simple common sense informs me that this would be within their work contract...as this is exactly the type of situation that one pays Lawyers $500/hr. to forsee and keep a Company from falling prey to.
Both FD and DK tournaments seem to be rigged to me. I played baseball tournaments and i was actually in first place a few times but with a few innings left, out of nowhere, fake accounts with 1 or 2 wins with players you would never pick come from behind and win the top prizes. Instead of winning a few thousand, I end up winning $1.20 or something. Unless you get a download of everybody's lineup after the games start, which is not hard to do, the games can be rigged.
I'm in a State thats not allowed to play. I've been mad about this fairly frequently but also not...cuz of what you say. Its what I assumed to be the case. I mean, put yourself in their place, you have an advertised promise to pay out Millions and you also have an executable way via Computer Technology to avoid paying out the entire amount...
The conclusion that most would reach is that you've been "gifted" through your hard work and special genius a unique opportunity within history to make a whole lot of money and very possibly get away with it. On top of that you're wisdom is so great that you've maneuvered the Greasing of The Right Wheels, the VC investors you attracted came with such great "contacts" and now you're here with an investors list that includes names that are gonna make damn sure that the rest of that Iceberg that Felix Under alludes to a couple posts back remains unseen.
The Conclusion you arrive at is that you're almost God-Like, modern-day untouchable, like, On-High at the top of a mountain looking down on the teeming mass of peasants. The Hell with them, people get what they deserve what they work for and you worked hella hard for this, all you're doing is using Technology to its maximum benefit for yourself. Its where you arrive at..."who could really find fault with that? Its what they'd do if they could but they can't because they aren't as smart as me."
I wouldn't expect much more to come from this....or much more re: "further revelations" of unethical stuff cuz as far as DFS has made it suggests some real powerful people are backing it cuz they're making money from it and all whose being taken advantage of is scumbag gamblers. Lesser People than themselves. The way they see it, at least.....The Unwashed Masses. And these people, these politicians and bankers....this is their Life's Blood...taking advantage of whoever they can.
Expecting to see any real concern for Gamblers getting taken is about the same as expecting sympathy for Smokers.
Might be some later Class Action lawsuits if stuff can get proven but I doubt that comes to pass. I cannot even anywhere near to fathom they will be this reckless to let incriminating info get out.
