Late last month, I was getting dinner on the table when an email hit my inbox with some bad news.
“Upon review your account has been closed at DraftKings’ discretion,” the message read. “We understand that this is not the decision that you were hoping for but this decision is final.”
I hadn’t bet on sports in months and had withdrawn all but a few cents of my balance. Why, I wondered, would my account even be under review? Was it something I’d said?
In September, I’d published an investigation into how online sports betting companies like DraftKings court customers — and whether the internal guardrails they’ve put in place to stop their users from spiraling out of control are firm enough. For that piece, I’d intentionally bet like a problem gambler, recklessly escalating my betting behavior over 10 weeks. My wagering had been informed by a panel of professional sports bettors, recovering addicts and addiction specialists.
As I flagrantly waved the red flags, DraftKings made me a VIP and assigned me my very own personal host. My recklessness was being rewarded. It just took three weeks and about $6,000 of losses.
If you’ve bet on sports with FanDuel or DraftKings, you can help ProPublica understand how these apps work. Use our browser extension to download your betting history, then upload your files.
The company, like the rest of the industry, says it doesn’t want to profit off of addiction, and has invested heavily in a system of tools and in-app prompts designed to help bettors put conditions on their gambling and slow them down. But my experiment raised serious questions about the effectiveness of this system, what’s known as “responsible gaming.”
So on one hand, I could understand how a story like mine, which scrutinized a core business function, might rankle company executives. But on the other hand, DraftKings had been downplaying the significance of my story for weeks.
In an interview for the piece, the company’s chief responsible gaming officer, Lori Kalani, had told me that the system “worked the way it was supposed to” in my case by feeding me some 30 responsible gaming messages over the course of my 10-week betting spree. And on Oct. 22, about a month after publication, DraftKings CEO Jason Robins doubled down, telling a CNBC journalist that he had “personally looked” at my entire betting history and was “pretty proud of how we handled it.” (He also made false claims about my reporting, but I’ve already addressed that on X.)
So as I read the notice of my account closure, I wondered: What changed, exactly?
DraftKings didn’t respond when I asked. All I got was a check in the mail for 94 cents, the remainder of my balance. But what was clear was that my investigation was reaching more and more people — including state regulators and federal lawmakers. Since publication, it had gone viral. A 27-minute, behind-the-scenes documentary of our work that we posted on YouTube on Oct. 10 had been viewed more than 6 million times in just three weeks.
Watch: Inside Our $22K Sports Betting Experiment
The video offered viewers who may not be familiar with ProPublica (or perhaps not inclined to read 4,000-word stories) a way to learn about the reporting in the venue where so much sports betting content lives. Most of our viewers were young men — the prime sports betting demographic. And boy did they engage, leaving 3,500 comments on YouTube and flooding my inbox with messages about the same features and VIP perks detailed in my story.
Regulators from across the country were citing my investigation when announcing that they were going to take a look for themselves at how DraftKings and its ilk incentivize users to keep betting. Federal and state officials were also demanding answers about how the company lures in its customers and keeps them in the action. In Ohio, regulators were even proposing a rule to restrict the apps’ marketing practices that spoke directly to one of the findings in my piece.
On the morning of Oct. 27, I sent DraftKings a series of questions for a story about that impact.
That evening is when the unsigned notice from DraftKings Support about my account closure appeared in my inbox. Two hours later, the company sent me a formal response to my questions, writing, in part, that “regular conversations and check-ins with regulators are normal course of business” and denying that the company improperly targets losing gamblers.
I may no longer be able to access my account, but I’m still reporting on DraftKings and the online gambling industry.
In fact, right now, we’re collecting wagering data from bettors to better understand how the major operators handle problem gambling. You can help by submitting your data here. If you’ve got a tip, you can also reach me directly at 917-512-0276 and [email protected].
