New Jersey’s online gambling and sports betting operators just got taken to the state’s regulatory woodshed for a variety of shortcomings.
As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. This week, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) released its bimonthly flood of regulatory decisions, which showed that many of its gaming licensees have been acting with great irresponsibility.
The most significant ruling concerns Scientific Games’ SG Digital division, which operates in New Jersey as NYX Digital Gaming. The ruling, which was signed on November 18, saw the DGE slap a $100k penalty on the entity for “deploying three games that were not the versions tested and approved” by the DGE.
The Press of Atlantic City reported that the online games in question were offered to the public in late January through SG Digital’s online partners. The games were live until March, when SG Digital discovered the cockup through an internal audit. In a separate ruling dated November 16, the DGE slapped an additional $10k penalty on SG Digital for “multiple regulatory violations.”
The DGE slapped a $26,500 penalty on William Hill’s New Jersey-licensed online sports betting operations for taking action from 16 gamblers who’d opted to exclude themselves from further wagering. The DGE also ordered Hills to forfeit slightly more than $5k won from these self-excluded bettors.
iGaming Cloud, the cloud-based platform (now known as GiG Core) operated by Gaming Innovation Group, was hit with a raft of penalties, including (a) $7k for allowing self-excluded patrons to open accounts and wager; (b) $2k for deploying a game with unapproved features and failing to generate a patron account report and wagering summary report for Hard Rock Atlantic City; and (c) being unable to recover slot tournament data after a system crash and for fixing the error without notifying the DGE.
The Stars Group’s PokerStars brand was penalized $5k after losing around two hours of poker hand history data, while software supplier GAN was dinged $1k for its “failure to ensure adequate website performance” and two Caesars Entertainment casinos were ordered to forfeit over $8k in funds won from prohibited individuals.
