(D-N.J.) called last month for a hearing on the daily fantasy sports industry and its close relationship with professional leagues and teams. Sider has been playing since his college days, before fantasy football exploded on the internet.
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Even more alarming: DraftKings employees reportedly won almost $6 million playing at FanDuel. But other posters said that FanDuel showed him as having won $350,000. FanDuel is based in New York; DraftKings is based in Boston and has offices in New York.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has given each fantasy sports company until October 15 to list the names, titles and job descriptions of employees who work with data that could be used for a personal advantage on the sites.
He also asked for copies of each site’s employee handbook, data usage policy and “any policies or procedures concerning the proper use of company data and any formal policies or procedures concerning employee participation in fantasy sports”. “It was something that should have never been allowed because it should have been clearly stated that [employees] aren’t allowed to play other daily fantasy sites”.
Robins also said that there would be a third-party audit of DraftKings’ procedures, also claiming that there had been a prior agreement with FanDuel to have a third-party audit them before this became a public issue.
Whether or not these activities should be considered gambling has been a point of contention, but the legality tends to rest on the fact that technically these are games of skill, not chance. The league issued a statement Monday saying it was “surprised to learn” DraftKings employees were allowed to play in these daily fantasy leagues.
In a joint statement, both companies say internal fraud monitoring found no misuse of information.
Identical copies of the letter-apart from Boccio’s inclusion to FanDuel-were sent to both companies, which you can read below. Many fantasy sports employees were fans of the product before they were employees of the company.
FanDuel Inc. and DraftKings Inc., the biggest companies in the daily fantasy-sports industry, permanently banned employees from playing in daily contests for money and enlisted high-profile attorneys to review their internal policies.
Both start-up companies have been reacting to concerns about the integrity of their games this week because of a recent data breach involving a DraftKings employee.
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The daily fantasy format – in which fans pick players for a single game day and bet for pools of prize money rather than drafting a season-long team among groups of friends – has roped in hundreds of new converts, thanks to advertising blitzes that have made the two brands ubiquitous on football broadcasts and across the Internet. The internal data, describing how often players are selected by all players in the salary-cap style game, could be used strategically to build a lineup of players with a lot of potential who aren’t popular selections among opponents.
