Edelman said, “It would be foolish for a daily fantasy sports player based in Nevada to seek a website that is not blocking their entries, as such websites are both at high legal risk and may lack credibility”.
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U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, of Denver, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight committee, told The Denver Post last month that the fantasy sports betting “certainly looks like online gambling”.
“For years, this was a simple affair”, Noah said about the evolution of fantasy sports.
The subpoena reportedly ordered the FSTA to provide copies of board-meeting minutes.
The government may be investigating potential antitrust violations or fraud among the large fantasy sports sites, the person said. The industry leaders have since announced that they have each retained the services of former federal prosecutors to conduct reviews of their respective internal practices. Fantasy sports, unlike online poker, was deemed a game of skill and not chance. A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, Richard McGarvey, declined to comment.
“We do think they should be regulated”, said Lois Rice, executive director of the Colorado Gaming Association, which represents casinos in the state’s three gambling towns, Blackhawk, Central City and Cripple Creek. Additionally, with all the legal questioning on the federal level right now (not to mention other states such as New York and Massachusetts), it is probably considered way too risky to jump into DFS. In what might be a nod to daily fantasy being gambling, Las Vegas is keenly interested in this ruling, seeing these fantasy leagues as competition for its own sportsbooks.
“They’re doing something where there’s not any regulation involved”, Warner said of fantasy sports wagering.
“We have very aggressive gambling laws”, said Marc Dunbar, a partner at Jones Walker LLP in Tallahassee, Fla.
However, people began to wonder if this were a blip on the DFS screen.
Several sports book and casino operators said Friday they weren’t planning to launch daily fantasy sports websites with others now out of the picture. Often, the state leans toward whether it’s a game of chance or skill.
The two titans of the daily fantasy sports world are out of Nevada after regulators there said the sites need gambling licenses but DraftKings and FanDuel are now asking its Nevada customers to sign online petitions urging state lawmakers to legalize the contests in the state. All the hand-wringing here is due to this form of gambling being available over the internet. The Wall Street Journal also reported recently that the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are in the process of investigating the activity and operators ethics.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and player money have flowed into the fantasy-sports industry, which counts sports leagues, Alphabet Inc.’s investing arm, and major media companies among its investors and is an enormous advertiser on such networks as ESPN.
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“Just like meth, these fantasy sites are popular, addictive and getting unwanted attention from the law”, Noah said, before diving into the recent FBI investigation of daily sites like DraftKings and FanDuel.
