New Jersey regulator orders bet365 to pay $519,000 for revising odds
DGE brands bet365's conduct as “problematic” and “unacceptable” after it discovered odds had been changed without the regulator’s permission following a routine audit
Bet365 has been ordered to pay out more than $519,000 to 199 sports bettors by New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE).
The order has been issued after it was found that the operator altered odds on already concluded events, as bets had been placed with “obvious errors”, according to bet365.
On July 22, 2024, the DGE sent a letter to the UK-based operator ordering all payouts to take place within 10 days.
The issue centres around 13 different sporting events that took place between December 2020 and November 2022, in which bet365 accepted bets on markets that displayed “incorrect odds.”
In the majority of instances, bet365 paid bettors their winnings and then “unilaterally revised the odds for these wagers” without informing the regulator, the DGE said.
One of the events in question, an NCAA basketball game between Brigham Young University and University of Oregon in November 2021, there were 63 bets placed by 18 customers, with 57 winning. In this instance, bet365 revised the odds for all winning wagers after paying bettors.
The most recent offence came in November 2022, when bet365 did not pay out on a winning bet placed in relation to the Tennessee Titans versus Green Bay Packers NFL clash, citing the odds posted should have been considered an “obvious error” because they were “egregious.”
DGE rules state that while an operator is allowed to revise odds for an event, it can only do so once it has been granted approval by the regulator.
Mary Jo Flaherty, interim director of the DGE, said: “Bet365 failed, in all instances, to recognise that although bet365’s house rules were approved by the division, it was with an express statement and caveat that bet365 was prohibited from voiding any wager without prior division approval, as is the standard course in division approval of house rules and as set forth in division regulation.”
The DGE went on to outline how a failure of bet365’s internal software, alongside “manual trading errors”, caused the issue.
Flaherty continued: “These failures are both problematic as to bet365’s business ability to conduct online gaming and the integrity and reliability of its operational systems and, therefore, unacceptable as they resulted in misleading wagering information that was relied upon by its patrons and ultimately lead to incorrect payouts for numerous patrons.”
This is not the first time bet365 has fallen foul of such a rule, with the operator also pulled up by the DGE in April of last year for accepting 101 bets from 47 customers in New Jersey on an NBA game between the New York Knicks and Cleveland Cavaliers, before claiming it had offered incorrect odds on the event.
Having initially refused to honour the seven winning wagers, bet365 later confirmed it had paid the three patrons to the tune of $13,776.25 based on the original odds.
Meanwhile, bet365 is not the only operator in the DGE’s firing line as of late.
Just last month, New Jersey’s regulator fined DraftKings $100,000 for filing inaccurate sports betting data, something that DGE claimed amounted to “gross errors and failures.”
That saga stemmed from DraftKings reporting more money than had actually been wagered on parlay bets, which in turn led the operator’s land-based licence partner, Resorts, to file sports betting tax returns that were incorrect for the three months between December 2023 and February 2024.
EGR has contacted bet365 for comment.