FanDuel Employees Had to Sign a Policy That Instructed Them How to Avoid Looking Suspicious When Playing on DraftKings

In this week’s edition of there’s something fishy going on at DraftKings and FanDuel, the good folks over at Deadspin have come across FanDuel’s old policy, which can be read in full here that specifically told its employees not to win too much money on DraftKings or people would become suspicious.

This just adds to the ever growing scandal at the two largest Daily Fantasy Sports sites on the planet.

The policy, which was divulged during one of their recent lawsuits revealed that their employees would have to comply and sign this policy. While this policy has recently changed due to the scrutiny that FanDuel has faced over the last few months, this specific policy had a core principle of “playing on other sites helps employees do their jobs better.” Seems harmless, right? After reading that policy, it certainly doesn’t seem harmless.

Some of the main points from FanDuel’s rules for playing on other sites that stand out are:

• Never be among the top five players by volume on any one site (based on site leaderboards). Never be among the top ten overall on the RotoGrinders leaderboard. Top players frequently become targets for accusations by other users.
• Never account for more than 2% of entries in any tournament of more than 1,000 entries. Never account for more than 5% of entries in any tournament of more than 100 entries. Players who swamp big tournaments with entries frequently become targets of accusations.
• Don’t be the 2nd person into a head to head contest against the same opponent in more than one contest per day. This rule will greatly limit the ability to exploit information about user performance, and will also limit the likelihood of complaints from users.

Some of FanDuel’s goals for having employees sign the policy were:

• Reassure any concerned site users that employees aren’t exploiting inside info.
• Reduce chance of users questioning ability of employees to exploit inside info against them when they play on other sites.

After reading the policy in full, does it seem like the higher ups at FanDuel didn’t have any clue that perhaps their policies weren’t exactly on the up and up? I think they were well aware of their shady practices. Something continues to not sit right with me here and I’m sure we’ll learn of more scandalous details over the coming months.