The house always wins.
In the case of an online slots game launched by DraftKings in Connecticut last summer, the house always wins.
A state investigation found that 522 gamblers played the game over 20,000 times without a single payout.
The investigation was first reported by CT Insider.
A single player had played the game—Deal or No Deal Banker’s Bonanza—hundreds of times without a win.
The player was a high roller, according to CT Insider, which reported he had his own “VIP host” at the company because he wagered about $1 million a year with the company. He sent the company a video of a nonstop losing streak; it responded by freezing his account and sending him to a gambling addiction hotline, according to CT Insider.
DraftKings eventually determined the problem was caused by a “computer glitch” and returned all $23,909 that had been lost on the game before the glitch was discovered.
But Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection was irate. “Neither DraftKings nor the game’s developer, White Hat Gaming, notified DCP of the incident until Aug. 31,” according to CT Insider. That was days after the companies discovered the glitch and shut down the game, and came only after regulators had heard from players on epic cold streaks. A spokesperson for the Connecticut regulator said that “they would not have taken it seriously until our investigators got involved.”
White Hat was ultimately fined $3,500; DraftKings was hit with a much larger fine for its handling of the situation, which the DCP spokesperson unfavorably compared to White Hat’s “candid” response. One unlucky loser was told by DraftKings that they were simply on a “cold streak” and that “there is nothing wrong with the game itself,” which DCP called a “completely false statement.”
The state said that the settlement with DraftKings, which was reached in April of this year, required the company to “implement greater internal controls for their products, submit regular reports for new games to DCP, and make improvements to their consumer complaints process.”
The $19,000 fine is still paltry for DraftKings, which did $1.2 billion in revenue in the final quarter of last year alone.
“The issue in Connecticut arose from an error on the game developer’s side,” a DraftKings spokesperson said in a statement to Front Office Sports. “We identified a possible issue within 48 hours of launch and immediately escalated it for investigation. All impacted customers were fully refunded within days of concluding there was an issue, and we have not encountered any similar issues with this vendor.”
A spokesperson for the Connecticut regulator did not immediately respond a request for comment.
