Indiana Sports Betting Apps Fined for Self-Exclusion Failures
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00:00Okay, so some self-exclusion bets placed, some self-imposed fines.
00:10Interesting to see this being done by two Indiana sports betting apps.
00:14What happened here?
00:15Who were the apps, and what did they fine themselves for?
00:17Yeah, some interesting stuff in Indiana, and every, you know, six or eight weeks or so,
00:23they have their state gaming commission meetings, and they do dish out a fair bit of fines to
00:32the operators.
00:33In this case, BetMGM and Fanatics both agreed to pay $2,500 in fines from those Indiana
00:41sports betting regulators, and it turns out that some tech changes that they were working
00:46on kind of opened up the door for some prohibited players to place bets.
00:53Those players were on that self-exclusion list, and some of these tech changes allowed
00:58them to then reaccess those accounts and place some bets.
01:02So for Fanatics, one person was able to place more than $3,200 in bets after his account
01:08was accidentally turned back on when Fanatics was migrating over from PointsBet towards
01:16the end of February.
01:18That player was able to deposit $1,300, he made about 22 bets, and Fanatics was able
01:24to sort of self-identify that error.
01:27They caught the error themselves, they alerted the regulators, and they suspended that account
01:33as soon as they were able to determine that and refunded that player, whatever that remaining
01:38balance was, about $1,100 in that account.
01:42Now on MGM's side, a similar sort of issue, if you recall around last summer, they were
01:50migrating a lot of their tech to that single account, single wallet.
01:55So if you had an Indiana sports betting account with MGM, then you could use that same app
02:03in any of the other states that they were live.
02:06And when they were migrating this over, it was pulling all of these self-exclusion lists,
02:12which were, prior to that change, all individual lists in each individual state.
02:18So this migration to that single account, single wallet, was pulling all of these self-exclusion
02:23lists into a singular database, which would then prevent anybody on that list, let's say
02:29in Indiana, they'd be prohibited from playing in any other state that they were located in.
02:36For this one player, this account did not migrate properly.
02:40This player was able to create a fresh account and deposit several hundred dollars, make
02:47an undisclosed number of bets before MGM was able to detect this error.
02:54They were then able to suspend this account, refund that player, whatever that remaining
02:59balance was.
03:00It was about $100, $110, and then self-report that to Indiana.
03:07So like I said off the top, two fines for bet MGM and Fanatics, $2,500 a piece for allowing
03:15prohibited players to access those sports betting apps and place bets when they were
03:20on that self-exclusion list.