Literally just got retweeted by Keith Olbermann from the New York Times.
Major story which might take out the highest source of ad revenue, it seems, of this football season: The Daily Fantasy Sports juggernaut that you can't watch a sporting event anymore without seeing about 4 ads an hour for the different sites.
Well... (Current article here -- not sure if it's going to go behind the paywall or not!)
It now appears as if many of these mega-winners you see on these ads might be rig-jobs at best or employees of the industry at worst.
A DraftKings employee -- stated by the New York Times article by Joe Drape and Jacqueline Williams as a mid-level manager -- admitted to "inadvertently releasing data" before the games last week (Week 3 of the NFL season), a week in which he won $350,000 on FanDuel -- a rival site.
(EDIT TO ADD 5:10 PM 10/5: Deadspin reports that the money won was 2nd place in a contest similar to DraftKings' Millionaire Maker contest.)
Before today, employees of both companies actually had won large amounts at the other site, but the practice has been banned as of today. These employees basically set the "prices" of players (teams are constructed with a maximum "salary cap"), and then the employees have used the information of the most-commonly taken players to their advantage, with predictable results.
The horse may be out of the barn, though -- it is hard not to believe that the Daily Fantasy "contests" are, now, not as rigged (if not worse!) than the contests on which they are based.
Daily Fantasy is as big of a scam as the sports they are based on. Get out while you still can.
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