DraftKings and FanDuel reel in billions annually from Maryland bettors, the majority of them in Baltimore, but a lawsuit filed on April 3, 2025 by that city alleges that those leading sports books are singling out customers with gambling disorders and luring them deeper in with deception.
According to the lawsuit, Marylanders waged more than $5 billion in fiscal year 2024, and in the first half of this fiscal year have put down an additional $3.7 billion. “But rather than accept a robust and profitable market, DraftKings and FanDuel have sought to guarantee their profitability by cheating, hoping to hook, and then ultimately exploit, as many users as possible,” it says.Because of the legal waivers that customers sign when setting up online accounts, individuals can not go after sports books, and can not join in on class action lawsuits. But municipalities can.
According to the lawsuit, Baltimoreans are lured through the door with the promise of bonus bets or other similarly named promotions designed to get them to gamble.
One such alleged ploy by DraftKings involved extending $150 bonus bets to new customers, in the form of six separate $25 bonus bets that must be used in the first seven days of signing up. FanDuel has a similar promotion. The goal of the sports books, according to the lawsuit, is to get these customers to bet often, as soon as they sign up.“Defendants are not interested in people merely dipping their toes in the water: They want bettors to bet, in significant amounts, over and over. Some get hooked, and that’s the point. Defendants will relentlessly ping their users to bet and bet often, with compulsive gambling an inevitable result.”
Individuals with gambling disorders are identified through algorithms and targeted, to squeeze “maximum potential revenue” or “lifetime total value” and VIP programs are tailored to extract as much money as possible from them, using personalization to induce more bets, constantly, with push-notifications,” the lawsuit alleges.
“The platforms are designed to create disordered gamblers and then exploit them.”
Flutter, the parent company of FanDuel, also named in the 51-page lawsuit, has allegedly been collecting troves of user data, as many as 186 attributes per bettor. That information includes their propensity to gamble and susceptibility to marketing.
“Defendants targeting of the vulnerable is so widely known that professional gamblers have taken to purposefully mimicking the behavior of those with a gambling disorder— e.g., by programming bots to open their mobile applications in the middle of the night, as though the users simply cannot help but wake up to check their bets— to encourage Defendants to provide rewards designed to keep people using the betting application.”
Both FanDuel and DraftKings have declined to comment.
The City of Baltimore lawsuit makes the case that because online gambling can be done from anywhere at virtually anytime, people who have addictive gambling disorders can still gamble without drawing the same attention to their habits of spending hours at a casino. Their relatives and friends might assume everything is normal, until it is too late.
Two members of the U.S. Congress have reintroduced an act that would require states offering sports betting to meet minimum federal standards in the categories of marketing, affordability and AI to create a safer, less addictive product.
U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Representative Paul D. Tonkin reintroduced on March 12, 2025, the Supporting Affordability and Fairness With Every Bet (SAFE Bet) Act, picking the time to coincidence with the start of March Madness, an annual college basketball single-elimination tournament that is one of the most bet on sporting events in the world.
“We’re introducing this bill just before March Madness for a simple reason: To make sports betting safer and to stop the sports betting industry from abhorrently exploiting addiction,” Senator Blumenthal said. “We have seen far too many — especially young people — driven into gambling abuse disorder, which is a disease. Like all addictions, we must take every step to prevent it and treat it — not amplify or exploit it. The term March Madness is meant to imply an exuberance and joy as well as enthusiasm, but let’s be very clear: Sports betting has become a science for gambling entities. It is the science of exploitation and targeting individuals who are prone to addition. The science of targeting and tracking gamblers who lose bets and enticing them to bet more and more until they are driven into ruin. That’s the abuse that we are trying to stop through the SAFE Bet Act.”
In one of the more egregious cases linked to online gambling, the former manager of financial planning and analysis for the Jacksonville Jaguars football team, Amit Patel, admitted that he stole over $22 million from the organization primarily to fuel his online gambling addiction. He was convicted last year of wire fraud and is currently in prison serving a six-year sentence.
Patel went as far as creating virtual credit cards for FanDuel and DraftKings which he used to gamble away most of the funds that he embezzled from the Jaguars’ credit card account. According to the lawsuit, “Patel used these fraudulent VCCs he created in large part to fund his effusive online gambling on the FanDuel and DraftKing platforms.”
Patel said he was offered perks on an almost daily basis by a VIP representative for FanDuel. While in prison, Mr. Patel sued FanDuel, and its parent company Flutter Entertainment, alleging that it used information about his addiction to draw him further in, even extending him massive amounts of credit to gamble. FanDuel recently asked a judge for arbitration, challenging the lawsuit on the basis that Mr. Patel has no standing to file it.
The University of Maryland’s Center of Excellence on Problem Gambling stated that while 11.3% of Marylanders who participated in traditional sports betting showed signs of disordered gambling, nearly double, 20.8%, of online sports bettors showed signs of disordered gambling.
As Derek Webb, Head of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling put it, “You put the most addictive behavior on the most addictive device. . . What could go wrong?”
