ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey — It may have seemed too good to be true, but on April 1, it happened: one of the country’s largest sportsbooks took bets on mixed martial arts fights that had taken place a week earlier.
FanDuel accepted 34 bets on the fights promoted by the bookmaker as live events scheduled to take place on April 1, 2022.
But in reality, the fighting had already taken place a week earlier, on March 25.
New Jersey gambling regulators fined FanDuel $2,000 for the error, and the company paid more than $230,000 to settle the bets.
FanDuel declined to comment Wednesday on the fine, which the company agreed to pay.
The state Division of Gaming Enforcement said in a letter made public Monday that FanDuel stated it was not notified by its data feed providers that the Professional Fighters League matches were in fact a recording of events that had already occurred.
Instead, FanDuel’s trading team manually created betting markets based on information they received directly from the Professional Fighters League, wrote Gina DeAnnuntis, New Jersey’s deputy attorney general.
“FanDuel confirmed that its traders had not confirmed with PFL that the event had occurred earlier and was presented via a delayed tape,” she wrote.
FanDuel told the state that as of April 1, 2022, there were 26 online bets and eight physical bets worth $190,904 placed on the events.
FanDuel subsequently received a notice from the International Betting Integrity Association, an organization that monitors sports betting transactions for suspicious activity or unusual patterns. The organization noted that the events it was offering odds on had already taken place.
According to the state, FanDuel paid out the bets for $231,094.
The fine from New Jersey regulators was levied on Jan. 2 but not made public until this week. The state also ordered FanDuel to update its internal controls to prevent similar events from happening in the future.
It wasn’t the first time a New Jersey bookmaker accidentally took bets on something that had already happened.
In 2021, 86 gamblers placed a bet on a British football match that had already happened the day before. The bets were voided, and regulators in New Jersey fined Malta-based sports betting technology company Kambi Group and Chicago-based Rush Street Interactive $1,000 each. In that case, the companies had offered a so-called proposition, or “prop,” bet on whether Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford would score a goal in a soccer match between Manchester United and Liverpool on May 13, 2021. (He did.)
But because a Kambi trader in England accidentally entered May 14 as the start date for the match, people were still able to place bets on the event after it had already finished and it was known that Rashford had already scored.
Last week, New Jersey regulators announced they had fined DraftKings, another major national sportsbook, $100,000 for reporting inaccurate sports betting data to the state.
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Follow Wayne Parry on X at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC