During its adjudicatory hearing with the Massachusetts Gaming Commission on Monday, DraftKings detailed the scope of how many prohibited wagers it allowed in the state on the Universal Tennis Ranking (UTR) Tour.
Per the meeting, DraftKings accepted a total of 864 wagers for $7,867 across three UTR events over the span of 12 days before discovering the issue and self-reporting it to the MGC. Losing wagers were refunded and pending wagers were canceled.
Massachusetts did not approve wagering on the events, which are eligible to be bet on in some other states. According to MGC Investigation and Enforcement Bureau’s Zachary Mercer, DraftKings chalked the issue up to “miscommunication between the trading team and the trading compliance team.” He also noted that there was an instance where the trading team took regulations from a different state not realizing they differed from Massachusetts.
This is a bit of a recurring theme for operators who have appeared before the commission about other prohibited bets, such as those taken on in-state college sports teams. Commissioners have voiced their frustrations that copy-and-paste errors are resulting in prohibited wagers.
Some commissioners have also cautioned that they take even a single prohibited wager very seriously and seem to be signaling that these errors cannot be repeated.
In the past hearings, other operators have appeared to explain issues that resulted in anywhere from one to 28 errant prohibited bets. With hundreds of prohibited bets across a two-week window where DraftKings was accepting wagers, the scope of this violation is much larger.
DraftKings spoke in more detail about how the error came to transpire during a closed-door executive session. The operator asked for confidentiality to discuss the ins and outs of how the trading side of the business works.
The MGC has yet to report the result of any of these hearings, the earliest of which took place in March, so it is unclear how the commission will respond to a single prohibited bet compared to hundreds of problematic transactions. As was the case in other hearings, the MGC commissioners will deliberate on a proper response and announce the results of those deliberations at a later date.
