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6 hours ago

State investigators looking into $20K worth of bets placed on prohibited Belarusian soccer games

A soccer ball sits in a field PHOTO | Peter Glaser, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Massachusetts gamblers can place wagers on games in hundreds of leagues around the world, but state regulators are reminding sports betting firms bets on Belarusian soccer matches are prohibited.

Investigators at the Mass. Gaming Commission are scrutinizing the circumstances that led two different sports betting companies to accept nearly $20,000 worth of bets on events that are banned by Massachusetts regulations.

Fanatics took 127 wagers on Belarusian national soccer teams for a total stake of $968.13 between Sept. 13, 2023 and March 22, 2024, the Gaming Commission's Investigations and Enforcement Bureau said. FanDuel accepted 3,871 wagers worth $11,792 on Belarusian national soccer between March 20, 2023 and March 26, 2024, and also took 178 wagers worth $5,829 on a different Belarusian soccer team between July 16 and July 18, 2024, the IEB said.

All three instances were "in contravention of" the Gaming Commission's regulations, which spell out which sports, leagues, and events can be bet on in Massachusetts. When they adopted the catalog of events approved for wagering, commissioners included an explicit prohibition to ban betting on "any sports or sporting event overseen by Russian or Belarusian governing bodies, leagues, events and players," the commission's website says.

The commission's enforcement counsel, Nathaniel Kennedy, told commissioners that Fanatics explained that its "trading compliance team had inadvertently turned on an auto-authorized setting that allowed European Championship qualifications to be offered." Kennedy said the issue at Fanatics was identified by the Gaming Commission, which on July 3, 2024 sent a notice to all operators "that they should cease offering any Belarusian wagers."

"The explanation that FanDuel had provided us was that at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Flutter [Entertainment], which is FanDuel's parent company, had decided to cease offering Russian or Belarusian content across all brands. However, major governing bodies, including the UEFA, banned Russia from competing while permitting Belarus to compete and maintaining membership rights. This caused confusion, leading FanDuel to mistakenly believe that the wagering on Belarusian national teams were permissible in matches taking place outside of ban countries, Russia and Belarus," Kennedy said. "That was their explanation."

FanDuel did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. Commissioners were not satisfied with the explanation that Kennedy relayed from the company.

"But that does not address our prohibition. It was just pretty clear having nothing to do with that," Commissioner Eileen O'Brien said. She added, "They haven't addressed the fact that we have a prohibition on it flat out. So they may have this other thing over here, we said, 'Don't do it' pretty clearly. So I guess maybe for me, I would want further clarification on that, because that would seem like someone's not reading our events catalog properly, and that's a different situation."

Commissioners asked the IEB on Thursday to come back with a recommendation for resolving the Fanatics matters and to go back to FanDuel to get more of an explanation for their misstep before proceeding to any recommended resolution.

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