What Happened
The Office of Enforcement Counsel investigators dug up 4 separate scams – all of which were active in 2023 and 2024. They had been using other peoples’ personal details to set up thousands of new accounts on BetMGM & put them on stolen or dodgy payment methods.
Each of these schemes were a bit different in scale, but they all shared a common thread. The first one ran for about two and a half years and created over 1,500 fake accounts. Through those accounts, around $230,000 worth of bets were placed. The second one went on for just over 2.5 years and placed around $15,000 worth of bets through 34 accounts. The third one processed nearly $900,000 through 119 accounts over 29 months. The fourth one placed over $867,000 in bets over 19 months. The total they managed to swindle was over $2 million.
This Is Not the First Fine
We’ve already seen BetMGM get fined by Pennsylvania in Jan 2025. Back then they paid over $260,000 for letting players who were supposed to be on a self-exclusion list carry on placing bets. We also know that’s not the only place where things have gone wrong – in Massachusetts BetMGM is being looked at again after nearly 4,000 under-21s got sent promotional emails with marketing deals.
What This Means for the Market
A $100,000 fine on a company of this size is not the end of the world but the way the regulator framed the case is a lot more serious. They didn’t just treat it like one rogue incident, they said that this showed that the company had deeper problems in their systems for dealing with this sort of thing. That’s a big deal for the industry. US regulators have started expecting operators to have systems in place to catch this sort of thing right from the start, rather than just trying to pick up the pieces afterwards.
