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Despite a recent uptick in enforcement compared with previous years, Virginia regulators have said that nothing has changed in the way the state has issued sanctions for sports-betting violations.
After issuing only two fines in the first two years of legal sports betting in the state following its January 2021 launch, regulators have reached a series of eight settlement agreements for different violations since July 31.
In total, seven companies were fined more than $274,000 for the combined violations, compared with just two fines totaling $170,000 in just over two and a half years prior.
Virginia Lottery spokesman John Hagerty said that the recent uptick in violations does not reflect any change in strategy from the regulator.
“Nothing significant with respect to sports betting compliance monitoring is driving the timing of these sanctions,” Hagerty said. “There has been no change in policy or procedure.”
“The lottery audits every permit holder, and every part of their operation is subject to audit,” he added. “We constantly monitor and audit the sportsbooks and issue fines when deemed appropriate.”
The most frequent violations cited in the agreements published since July have centered around self-exclusion failures and impermissible wagers, with the largest of the fines being a $100,000 penalty in late September against Hard Rock Digital after the company failed to properly exclude an undisclosed number of players who were on the lottery’s voluntary exclusion list.
Kindred's Unibet also agreed a $25,000 fine for failing to prohibit a self-excluded player from placing bets on the platform.
In August, Betway operator Digital Gaming received a $20,000 penalty for distributing communications related to account creation to six people on the lottery’s self-exclusion list and 94 additional people who were on the company’s internal self-exclusion list or were noted as being in a “cooling-off” period.
Finally, FanDuel received a $15,000 fine and an additional required payment of $15,000 to the Virginia Council on Problem Gambling for a self-exclusion violation.
Hard Rock also received a $33,000 fine for accepting wagers on unapproved events and failing to submit an Internal Revenue Service form in a timely manner, while PointsBet received a $21,000 fine for accepting wagers either on known results or on unauthorized events on “several occasions since licensure.”
According to Vixio GamblingCompliance’s Enforcement Tracker, only New Jersey and Maryland have issued a comparable number of violations over the same timeframe, both in terms of number of violations and scale in fines.
However, Maryland’s recent enforcement actions reflect a host of violations committed over the first year of the state’s mobile sports-betting program rather than a significant ramp-up like Virginia’s, while New Jersey has consistently issued enforcement actions since its 2018 sports-betting launch, posting a biweekly list of rulings that frequently includes fines for sports-betting operators.
