Florida attorney Jennifer Hoekstra has filed 15 lawsuits against FanDuel and DraftKings, accusing the sports-betting companies of designing their mobile apps to foster addiction through notifications, bonuses and other techniques intended to bring customers back to wager.
The cases rest on a common theory that gambling apps use the same sort of engagement workflow seen on social-media platforms, CBS News reported. Hoekstra said she represented people who had lost “their houses and their spouses and their kids” through gambling, and argued that persistent alerts and bonus offers create a presence in users’ lives at times of boredom, stress, financial anxiety or emotional vulnerability.
Hoekstra likened the claims to a California social-media case decided in March, in which a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent and awarded damages of $4.2 million and $1.8 million, respectively. “It’s the same type of workflow, the same type of notifications,” she told CBS News. “It’s almost as if it’s the same type of addiction.”
The companies are contesting the broader allegation that their products fuel addictive behaviour. FanDuel said any assertion that it does not aggressively monitor and curb problem behaviour was “completely false.” The company said it had about 18 million customers and, alongside its parent company, spent $158 million on responsible gaming last year.
FanDuel said its safeguards include deposit limits, timeouts and self-exclusion tools, while trained specialists continuously review accounts and can impose limits or exclusions. It said its responsible-gaming operation conducted 58,000 manual account reviews, proactively removed 5,700 people for responsible-gaming reasons, and blocked one million prospective accounts when identities could not be verified.
DraftKings said it could not comment on pending litigation but took responsible engagement concerns seriously. It said all employees receive annual responsible-engagement training; its chief responsible gaming officer reports directly to the chief executive and leads a team of more than 50 full-time staff. The company also pointed to tools allowing customers to set cool-off periods and limits on deposits, wagers, time and losses.
The allegations focus in part on the gap between those controls and companies’ retention practices. A former FanDuel employee told CBS News that the business could distinguish ordinary betting from waning activity and would often send push notifications to people who had taken a break. “It’s less about cutting them off than slowing them down,” the former employee said. “It’s never forever.”
Louis Ruggiero, a recovering gambling addict, told CBS News that FanDuel offered him VIP status after he lost $100,000 in three months. He said the incentives became larger, the outreach more personal and the losses deeper, calling it “predatory retention disguised as hospitality.” Esteban Ruiz-Haynes described receiving texts from a FanDuel manager and said he sometimes wagered a weekly paycheck on a single game.
Joe Maloney, president of the Sports Betting Alliance, called cases such as Ruggiero’s outliers and said the overwhelming majority of online bettors gamble responsibly. “It is for entertainment. It is not for wealth creation,” he said, adding that operators offer deposit, wager and loss limits.
Americans placed $167 billion in online sports wagers last year, according to American Gaming Association figures cited by CBS News. A UCLA study found that online sports-gambling access was associated with a roughly 10% rise in bankruptcy likelihood and an 8% increase in debt-collection amounts, effects that generally emerged about two years after online gambling became legal. The study also found average credit scores fell by 2.75 points when states introduced online access.
Problem gambling is not confined to sports betting. The National Council on Problem Gambling found that 8% of American adults, or almost 20 million people, reported experiencing at least one indicator of problematic gambling behaviour “many times” in the preceding year. Its 2024 survey found that the rate had declined from 11% in 2021 to 8%, the same level recorded in 2018, and said frequency of gambling and participation in multiple forms of gambling were its strongest predictors of problematic behaviour.
