Amid a U.S. boom in betting online, the European companies behind FanDuel and BetMGM are using features in America that they dropped in Britain after acknowledging them as risks to gamblers.
Flutter’s Chief Executive Peter Jackson publicly apologized for failing to intervene, saying the company had a responsibility to do so "when our customers show signs of problem gambling.”
Over the next few years, another one of Jackson’s customers — this time in America — spiraled even further out of control, gambling millions of dollars of stolen money with Flutter’s U.S. brand FanDuel. Amit Patel, then a mid-level finance manager at the Jacksonville Jaguars football team, deposited $20 million of his employer’s money into his FanDuel account between 2019 and early 2023, and then lost most of those embezzled dollars, according to court documents. Patel and the British animal-shelter chief each pleaded guilty to fraud.
Despite the enormous sums, FanDuel didn’t question the source of Patel’s funds until late 2022, his lawyer, Alex King, told Reuters. Patel’s annual salary was less than $90,000, King said. FanDuel not only didn’t intervene as Patel’s losses snowballed, according to King, but also assigned Patel a VIP customer representative who encouraged him to continue gambling.
Flutter and FanDuel didn’t answer questions about Patel.
In Britain, where online gambling is more established than the United States, Flutter and other bookmakers have in recent years acknowledged some of their previous practices risked causing harm and ended those practices. Some have also publicly accepted a responsibility to protect customers from problem gambling as cases of addiction, suicide and gambling-related crime stacked up there.
But in the booming American market, Dublin-based Flutter and Britain’s Entain (ENT.L) — which jointly owns U.S. sports betting company BetMGM — have not implemented many of those same safeguards. They also routinely employ practices they discontinued in Britain after admitting they put UK gamblers at risk, Reuters found, based on a review of corporate filings, company statements, executive testimony to lawmakers, job advertisements and interviews with gamblers and former employees.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/online-gambling-giants-conquer-us-with-tactics-deemed-too-tough-britain-2024-07-03/