Daily fantasy sports operator DraftKings is investigating two of its players for potentially colluding to win the site’s “Fantasy Football Millionaire” contest.
User Martin Crowley, who goes by the name “papagates,” was among the winners of the contest, which yielded a $1 million prize. But Crowley’s brother, Tom, also won a million dollar contest last year, which immediately resulted in speculations that the two may have colluded to win the contest.
DraftKings head of compliance Jennifer Aguiar confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that they “are in the process of on ongoing investigation.”
Aguiar declined to comment further on the specifics of the internal probe, which according to the news outlet, “appears to be focused on whether at least one winner of Sunday’s contest found ways around the site’s limits on how many entries each user can submit and the level of cooperation they can have with other players.
Players are allowed to submit a maximum of 150 entries for Fantasy Football Millionaire. For that particular contest, there were almost 257,000 entries at $20 apiece. Winning the contest would require having high-scoring players that nobody else owns, which means that having more lineups with little overlap to other entries increases a player’s chance of winning.
If the brothers played the maximum number, they would have submitted a total of 300 lineups.
“If you are sharing lineups for the purpose of—for the lack of a better word—gaming the system, that is unacceptable,” Aguiar said, according to the WSJ report.
The incident is the latest hiccup for the daily fantasy sports industry, which last year faced allegations of insider advantages involving a DraftKings employee, who was suspected of using insider information to win a six-figure prize. That incident led to calls for federal regulation of daily fantasy sports games.
