A state judge Monday rejected the requests of FanDuel and DraftKings to issue a restraining order to prevent Attorney General Eric Schneiderman from shutting down the fantasy sports operations in NY.
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“As a result of these efforts, FanDuel is now unable to accept deposits from its customers in NY, causing incalculable, immediate and irreparable harm to FanDuel’s business”, the company said in court papers Monday. A FanDuel statement on Monday accused Schneiderman’s office of interfering with the site’s third-party payment processors, pressuring them to stop providing financial connections to New York-based players.
DraftKings and FanDuel have both stated that they will fight the NY ban in court, though they had been hoping to allow players the right to continue until a formal ruling came from the courts.
The global push for daily fantasy sports has been in the cards long before the latest scrutiny in the United States. And guess what, that too is illegal in NY State.
Investors in fantasy sports gambling sites could find themselves in trouble with the law in the view of one expert on the dangers of gambling. DraftKings takes a percentage of the action and only makes more through more entry fees.
A Sports Business Daily article earlier this year cited stats showing the daily fantasy economy largely rests on a combination of “sharks” and “minnows” that reflects what you’d see in a casino gaming setup.
To a few extent, Schneiderman is following in the path of attorneys-general-turned-governors Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo, who cast the office of the state’s chief lawyer as a muscular watchdog of Wall Street and other matters that resonated nationally. It’s a $3.7 billion-a-year business already and is expected to reach almost $18 billion by 2020. Now daily fantasy has the full focus of powerful government figures who may decide if the games will continue. It is ironic that the 2006 federal law was meant to curb the spread of on-line poker, which is much more of a game of skill than fantasy sports because in poker, the participants actually have a voice in determining how their cards are played.
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The recent controversial revelations about how hard it is for average fan to win big money on the sites was also covered when Oliver pointed out how only 1 percent of DFS players are reportedly taking home the majority of the money.
