Fantasy sports lobbyist says games don’t qualify as gambling

New York’s attorney general is investigating Yahoo’s daily fantasy sports platform, adding the third-largest daily fantasy sports site to the office’s probe of the business.

FanDuel and DraftKings both cite the integrity of their fantasy sports websites in response to NY Times articles insinuating that employees of one site could easily make serious profits by engaging with another site, in a practice known well as “insider trading”.

A spokesperson for Yahoo said the company “does not comment on legal matters”.

Daily fantasy sports gaming is “plainly illegal” and “nothing more than a rebranding of sports betting”, Schneiderman said in legal documents filed in a Manhattan trial court in light of a widening investigation, Reuters reports.

Josh Schiller, part of the legal team operating on behalf of DraftKings, said: “Daily fantasy sports are not an illegal gambling operation, and there’s no credibility to the argument that season-long fantasy could be legal while daily fantasy isn’t”.

We look forward to being afforded a full and fair opportunity to demonstrate why daily fantasy sports are legal under NY State law. FanDuel temporarily suspended NY entries on Tuesday.

He ordered them back to court next Wednesday.

The injunction requested in NY is the latest threat to the daily fantasy sports industry.

“I’m a victor. It’s what I do and now that Yahoo! has daily fantasy games, I can win contests, win respect and win money every single day”, Damon Wayans Jr. says in a commercial for Yahoo. The two companies have become the subject of congressional inquiries as well as a ban in Nevada after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on television advertising in 2015.

In July, Ken Fuchs, Yahoo’s vice president of products, said the move would allow the Sunnyvale, Calif., company to expand its presence on mobile devices, draw in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic and create a base of steady transactional revenues by taking 10% of each wager.