A New Jersey father lost nearly $1 million he stole from his wife and two kids while in the throes of a ruinous gambling addiction the man’s family claims was intentionally “nurtured” by DraftKings, a new lawsuit claims.

Lisa D’Alessando says her husband funded his habit by maxing out her credit cards and draining their young childrens’ savings accounts, which were funded entirely by gifts they had gotten for Christmas, their birthdays, and their baptisms, according to the federal lawsuit filed Thursday and obtained by The Independent.

The husband began using the online platform in 2020. That year, he never gambled more than $3,775 in a single month, according to D’Alessandro’s complaint. However, by 2023, Mdallo ( the name of the father ) was completely hooked, betting as much as $125,000 a month, the complaint states.

“You think you’re building a nest egg  for yourself and your family, and it turns out it’s gone,” D’Alessandro’s attorney, Matthew Litt, told The Independent. “This was a middle-class family. A lot of it remains on a credit card, and the rest of it is just gone.”

D’Alessandro and the children, who are both under the age of 10, are now “doing the best they can” to recover, Litt said. “They’re trying. They’re fighting, for sure.” 

DraftKings did not respond to a request for comment.

Online sports betting is now legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Recent studies have found an associated increase in problem gambling, and researchers say legalized sports betting drains household finances faster and more thoroughly than other types of gambling. (The gambling industry denies this.)

By 2022, DraftKings had upgraded Mdallo to “Onyx Elite level status,” and the VIP hosts began offering him, among other things, a free vacation and a “suite of high-end Apple products,” as well as more prosaic items such as a set of DraftKings-branded whiskey glasses, according to the complaint.

“They’re incentivized to keep them playing until they bottom out,” Litt told The Independent. 

As the intensity of Mdallo’s habit increased, DraftKings failed to follow its own policy of requiring big gamblers to verify the source of their funds by furnishing either a W-2 or a bank statement, the complaint alleges. It says that Mdallo’s VIP hosts “knew that [he] would not be able to continue to deposit such large sums of money on its site if they required a verification,” because they “knew that the source of the money wagered was illegitimate.”

If DraftKings personnel had done their due diligence, they would have seen that Mdallo at one point was wagering more than four times his $175,000 annual income, according to the complaint.

Still, it says the VIP Hosts “were instructed and/or incentivized to avoid providing information on addicted gambling resources to customers who exhibited symptoms of gambling addiction.”

The suit is reminiscent of one brought in October by a former Jacksonville Jaguars employee serving a six-and-a-half-year prison sentence for plundering more than $22 million of the NFL team’s money and betting it on FanDuel, a DraftKings competitor. In that case, Amit Patel — who was also represented by Litt — accused FanDuel of “ceaselessly enticing” him to become a gambling addict by bombarding him with “relentless financial incentives, lavish trips, event tickets and other gifts.” 

In all, D’Alessando says her husband gambled almost $15 million on the DraftKings platform between January 2020 and January 2024, losing a total of $942,232.32 that in fact belonged to her and their two kids.

Her lawsuit accuses DraftKings of negligence, fraud, and violations of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, and demands the company return the money she says her husband stole from the three of them.