DraftKings and FanDuel Both Announce Third Party Audits, Permanently Ban Employees from Playing
By Jason Lisk
DraftKings CEO Jason Robins appeared on Fox Business News this morning, as reported by legalsportsreport.com. While he didn’t go into specifics of what the company had done to safeguard internal contest info in light of valuable internal player ownership data being leaked, he talked about some generally about some of the things that would be done. He reiterated that the employee in question, Ethan Haskell, is believed to have done nothing wrong in separately winning $350,000 on fellow DFS site FanDuel a week ago.
It was a little disappointing the reports that come out did not account for those facts and unfortunately dragged this individual’s name through the mud. He’s a good kid, his name is Ethan he works really hard and I find it very disappointing in order to have a very important discussion that we are very open to having and very committed to having about how we an do a better job creating a trusted and open environment for everyone, it’s just unfortunate for me that somebody who was innocent had to be smeared in order to have that discussion.
Robins also said that there would be a third-party audit of DraftKings’ procedures, also claiming that there had been a prior agreement with FanDuel to have a third-party audit them before this became a public issue.
In addition, he announced that employees would no longer be allowed to pay cash games at other daily fantasy sites, and that ban was being made permanent. The same was also announced by FanDuel, who is also banning employees from playing at other sites. These policy changes come right after the New York attorney general announced an inquiry into both DraftKings and FanDuel.
Justine Sacco, the FanDuel spokesperson, told Darren Rovell that DraftKings employees had won 0.3% of the winnings in the history of FanDuel. Of course, that’s a number without context–do we really think DraftKings employees make up 3 out of every 1000 people who participate on FanDuel? The total prior winnings by DraftKings employees while playing on FanDuel is estimated at $6,000,000.
FanDuel also announced a third-party investigation, announcing that former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, of law firm Debevoise & Plimpton would review internal controls, standards and practices. The identity of the firm who will be conducting any audit of DraftKings has not been publicly provided.