Baltimore Sues FanDuel and DraftKings Over Ad Practices

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00:00it appears that the state of Maryland not too happy with some of the advertisements,

00:03or maybe in just saying it another way, the pushing of sports bettors onto their site,

00:08at least in their eyes. Yeah, this lawsuit comes from actually the city of Baltimore,

00:13so separated from the state of Maryland, which legalized sports betting a few years ago,

00:18and it's been one of the biggest states where sports betting has happened. They get a lot of

00:21money there, but it comes from the city of Baltimore. The mayor, as well as the city

00:25council, filed this lawsuit yesterday, which kind of came as a surprise to pretty much the

00:30whole industry, as far as I know, alleging that FanDuel and DraftKings had been engaging in

00:35deceptive and unfair practices under the city's consumer protection ordinance. The suit targets

00:42these two sports books specifically, saying that they knowingly exploited vulnerable residents

00:48that deal with gambling disorders. It essentially outlined a two-pronged plan where

00:52they will issue bonus bets and promotions out to different users, and then the other part of the

00:57plan is collect about 186 data points about their activity, about how likely allegedly they are to

01:04become problem gamblers, and then how to exploit them. So this is some serious stuff. It's the

01:09first city we've ever seen file this kind of lawsuit. It's very interesting that it only

01:14targets FanDuel and DraftKings. The people who filed the suit said that that won't necessarily

01:20be the case, but you're kind of the victim of success sometimes. These are the two biggest

01:24faces in the space. They certainly dominate in Maryland like they do in the rest of the country.

01:29So they're the target of this lawsuit. It comes at a strange time. You have the Federal Safe

01:34Bet Act has been floated about in Congress a little bit, which would kind of address some of

01:39the complaints in this lawsuit, some of the use of AI to track certain aspects of how it better

01:45works and target them. The suit also alleges that Flutter, which owns FanDuel, has a ton of

01:51consumer protections in the UK that they don't use in the US, and it's kind of saying, why don't you

01:56use that here? They want more protections for their constituents. It seeks undisclosed monetary

02:01value, so we don't know how much money they would really be trying to recoup for not only the

02:06practices, but also sort of back pay in doing it as well. FanDuel and DraftKings have not put out

02:10a comment yet. As far as I understand, they're kind of caught off guard. They're still trying

02:14to figure out how to respond to this, but it's definitely big news. We'll see what happens going

02:18forward. It could lead to maybe some other cities following suit, or it could go nowhere. That's

02:23always the case with this stuff.