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Pennsylvania regulators approved a consent agreement on Wednesday (June 26) that includes a $100,000 fine for an affiliate of Cordish Companies after several sportsbook employees accepted illegal proxy bets.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) approved the fine for Stadium Casino, a Cordish subsidiary that operates the Live! Casino and Hotel in Philadelphia.
According to the agreement, three staff members at the casino’s FanDuel Sportsbook accepted 15 wagers totaling more than $287,000 by phone and text message for two weeks in June 2022, on behalf of a player who was not in the casino.
The issue was discovered when the board’s Bureau of Casino Compliance was notified that an employee placed three wagers totaling $95,000 for a player who texted him on his personal phone asking for the wagers to be placed.
The player told the employee that he would come to the casino that evening to pay for the wagers, but did not appear after the three wagers lost and never paid for the wagers, creating a variance in the reported returns.
The player came to the casino the next day and provided a written statement confirming that he placed the bets, and also claimed that his house had been broken into and a bag of cash taken as his reason for not appearing the previous night.
An investigation into the player revealed 12 additional instances of employees placing wagers for the player when he was not present at the casino.
The three employees were fired by the casino, and their personal gaming licenses were revoked by the PGCB.
The player has also been placed on the PGCB's involuntary exclusion list, said Dustin Miller, deputy chief enforcement counsel.
Tom Diehl, vice president of Stadium Casino, said that the casino has since lowered the surveillance notification threshold for sportsbook transactions to $10,000, as well as banning the use of personal phones by staffers in the sportsbook area, instead issuing company phones to the sportsbook supervisors with limited functionality.
“This is not the culture of our organization. We have a culture of compliance and training and these are obviously violations of the gaming regs as well as our training, procedures and internal controls,” added Craig Clark, executive vice president and general manager of the casino, who also apologized to the board and said the employees acted in a “rogue manner”.
Rich Cooper, counsel and vice president of regulatory affairs for FanDuel, added that FanDuel has a clear policy against permitting proxy wagering, including signage at teller windows that reminds employees that the activity is prohibited.
“In terms of training, prior to this incident, all staff had undergone induction training where proxy wagering was a part of that and where there was again, a clear statement about the fact that proxy wagering is a violation and is absolutely not allowed,” Cooper said.
Since then, Cooper said, the sportsbook has held quarterly training sessions that continue to focus on proxy wagering.
In a separate action on Wednesday, the PGCB also approved placing ten people on the involuntary exclusion list for creating multiple accounts on sportsbook platforms using the information of other individuals and funding the accounts with other people's credit cards, but then withdrawing funds from the accounts into bank accounts controlled by the now-excluded person.
An 11th person was placed on the involuntary exclusion list for requesting and receiving credit card chargebacks to avoid paying TwinSpires $5,150.
