New Jersey gaming regulator takes responsibility for FanDuel sports bet glitch

Business News

New Jersey’s head gaming regulator has taken responsibility for a sports betting glitch that cost Paddy Power Betfair’s FanDuel Group $82,000 on a bet.

The regulator said that new internal company controls have been put in place to prevent similar future problems.

Initially, FanDuel said it would not pay out the whole $82,000 because it was an error. New Jersey gaming regulators investigated and FanDuel reversed its decision, saying it would make the full payout.

“We’re partners with (FanDuel) in many ways. Maybe it was our fault that that happened,” David Rebuck, director of New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement, told a crowd at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

“So I will take responsibility for that as head of the division,” he said. “It should never have happened.”

The incident was “a bad hiccup for the state of New Jersey,” he said.

The state is ahead of nearly all others in regulating and taxing sports wagers after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in May threw open the door to any state that wants to legalize the activity.

FanDuel is owned by Paddy Power Betfair PLC.

In this case, regulators first examined whether there might be a criminal conspiracy or some other type of fraud aimed at hurting the company, Rebuck said.

But there was not. Instead, it was human error.

“We felt that maybe we needed additional staff here (at FanDuel) to give us added protections for quality control to oversee what was being entered while the trading was being managed,” Rebuck later told Reuters.

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