Amid battle with AG, FanDuel to stop taking NY deposits

To be clear, Daily Fantasy Sports took a huge hit in NY this week when the Attorney General sent cease-and-desist letters to FanDuel and DraftKings. FanDuel could continue to run its business in NY, just not accept bets from its residents.

Around a hundred protesters – a significant number of whom work for daily fantasy sports sites – gathered outside of NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office Friday morning.

He likened the companies’ business models to the lottery, saying his office’s one-month investigation revealed that the top 1 per cent of players reaped the majority of winnings.

“Opponents of fantasy sports are determined to take away our right to play, so we need to make our voices heard before it’s too late”, FanDuel wrote in its email. Online sports gambling sites are illegal in NY.

While both FanDuel and DraftKings say they do not oppose regulation, they maintain that their sites do not practice gambling and reject such classification.

“Mr. Boies, Mr. Schiller and their team look forward to representing DraftKings and joining their top-flight legal team, which will work with the regulatory agencies, including the NY attorney general, to resolve this dispute”, a DraftKings spokesman said.

In NY Friday, the crowd at the “Fantasy for All Rally” showed support for the sports fantasy websites.

DraftKings said it has more than 2 million customers, with around 7 percent-roughly 140,000-of them located in NY state.

According to Reuters, “DraftKings has filed a lawsuit asking the NY Supreme Court” to repeal the decision that declared their operations illegal.

Though a handful of states have banned fantasy sports, New York’s cease-and-desist order marks the first time in which fantasy-sports operators have been formally accused of criminal activity.

DraftKings and FanDuel, the embattled companies that dominate the field, are accusing New York’s attorney general of trying “to bully” them and hurt their businesses.

The two companies banned employees from playing, but local and federal authorities began to investigate whether the sites offered games of chance, essentially gambling.

The news comes on the same day two of the biggest companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, countersued the attorney general of NY.