The issue here is not whether or not it’s entertaining, it’s whether or not it is gambling. Why, then, would the government, and you in particular, decide to get involved in a product that’s just about entertainment. 25, 2016.Ī Fan Duel executive told me that daily fantasy sports is really all about entertainment. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Jan. In the below interview with Walt Bogdanich of The New York Times, conducted for our joint investigation into daily fantasy sports, Schneiderman talks about why he chose to investigate the industry, why he thinks the odds are stacked against users, and why he calls the sites “a particularly pernicious form of gambling.” While the sites defend their contests as perfectly legal games of skill, Schneiderman’s office has described daily fantasy sports as a “convoluted scheme.” An appeals court judge later ruled that the sites could keep operating until questions over their legal status were better settled.

In a cease-and-desist letter, he ordered the two sites to stop accepting “wagers” in the state, the largest market in the nation for the daily fantasy sports industry. In November, Schneiderman decided that the two sites were in violation of New York’s gambling laws. New York has become a key battleground in the fight over whether daily fantasy sports should be legal or not. At that point, we launched our investigation.” “Then the stories started to break about employees of these companies using non-public information to get a competitive advantage to win money on other sites. “I think DraftKings and FanDuel spent something like $31 million in the first week of the NFL season alone,” says Schneiderman. The first time that daily fantasy sports caught the attention of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was late last summer, when an advertising blitz made it close to impossible to watch an NFL game without seeing an ad for one of the industry’s two most popular sites, DraftKings and FanDuel.

Fantasy sports betting industry