Daily fantasy sports was the fastest-growing online gambling category of the 2010s. By the start of the 2015 NFL season, the two largest operators were DraftKings, based in Boston, and FanDuel, based in New York. Both companies were valued at more than one billion dollars. Both ran nightly tournaments with prize pools in the millions. Both employed several hundred staff, including content writers, product managers, and customer support agents. Many of those employees were active daily fantasy players in their own right.
Both companies had an internal policy. Employees of DraftKings were not allowed to play on DraftKings. Employees of FanDuel were not allowed to play on FanDuel. Both companies allowed their employees to play on the competitor site without restriction. The policy was widely understood inside both companies. It had never been publicly debated.
Ethan Haskell was a DraftKings content writer. He was 25 years old, lived in Boston, and produced articles on the DraftKings public blog covering strategy, projections, and weekly contest preview pieces. As a content writer, he had access to internal DraftKings systems, including the DraftKings player ownership database that recorded which lineups were entered in DraftKings contests and which players were most frequently used.
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On Sunday morning, September 27, 2015, Haskell accidentally posted a snippet of internal DraftKings player ownership data to the public DraftKings blog. The post was up for only a few minutes before he noticed the mistake and removed it. The data showed that a player named Brandon Marshall, who would later that day score three touchdowns in an NFL game, had been used in only approximately 3 percent of DraftKings Millionaire Maker contest lineups. A player named Cam Newton had been used in approximately 24 percent. The full ownership distribution was visible.
On the same Sunday, Haskell had entered the FanDuel NFL Sunday Million contest with a lineup he had constructed in advance. His lineup included Brandon Marshall, the player with the 3 percent DraftKings ownership. By the end of the day, he had finished second in the FanDuel contest and had won 350 thousand dollars.
Within 24 hours, several DraftKings users who had seen the accidentally posted ownership data put the two pieces of information together. They posted on the RotoGrinders forum that the second-place FanDuel winner appeared to be the same Ethan Haskell who had posted the DraftKings ownership data. They asked whether Haskell had used the DraftKings data to choose a low-ownership lineup at FanDuel.
On Monday, September 28, both companies issued public statements. DraftKings confirmed that Haskell was an employee and stated that he had not accessed the ownership data until 1:30 PM on Sunday, after FanDuel contest entries had locked at 1:00 PM. FanDuel confirmed that Haskell was a customer in good standing and that the 350 thousand dollar prize was valid. Both companies announced that employees would be temporarily prohibited from playing on competitor sites during a pending review.
The DraftKings timeline did not satisfy the public. Forum analysts pointed out that Haskell could have constructed his FanDuel lineup at any time before lock and could have used preliminary ownership trends that were visible to internal DraftKings staff well before lock. The argument was not that Haskell had cheated on a specific game. The argument was that DraftKings and FanDuel had been operating under a structural conflict of interest in which paid employees of each site had been allowed to play with non-public information on the competitor site.
The New York Times ran a front-page story on October 5, 2015. The headline was Scandal Erupts in Unregulated World of Fantasy Sports. The story framed the daily fantasy industry as a previously invisible form of online gambling that had grown to billion-dollar valuations without any meaningful regulatory oversight. The story was the first piece of major-newspaper coverage that the industry had received. It was uniformly hostile.
On October 6, 2015, the New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a formal investigation of both DraftKings and FanDuel under New York consumer protection law. On November 10, 2015, Schneiderman issued cease-and-desist orders to both companies and declared that daily fantasy sports constituted illegal gambling under New York state law. Both companies were ordered to stop accepting paid entries from New York residents. The state of Texas issued a parallel order in January 2016. By the spring of 2016, both companies were facing regulatory or legislative challenges in approximately a dozen additional states.
Both companies survived. They commissioned third-party legal opinions arguing that daily fantasy was a game of skill rather than a game of chance. They lobbied state legislatures to pass explicit daily fantasy authorization statutes. By the end of 2017, the majority of United States states had passed such statutes. The product was reclassified as a legal skill game in most of the country. The two companies merged operations in several markets during 2017 and 2018 and announced a full corporate merger in 2016 that was later blocked on antitrust grounds.
Ethan Haskell was not criminally charged. The 350 thousand dollar FanDuel prize was paid in full. The internal DraftKings review concluded that Haskell had not accessed the ownership data before contest lock. Haskell continued to work at DraftKings for approximately one additional year before leaving for an unrelated technology company. As of 2026, neither he nor any other employee of either company has been formally accused of using internal data to compete on a competitor site since the policy reforms of late 2015.
The DFS insider trading scandal of 2015 is the most-cited single event in the history of legal United States online gambling. It produced the federal-state regulatory framework under which DraftKings, FanDuel, and the broader online betting industry now operate. It produced the first widely publicized example of a structural conflict of interest in the operation of online gambling companies. It produced the first major regulatory action against online gambling operators by a sitting state attorney general. And it produced the durable consumer perception, which remains widespread in 2026, that the operators of online gambling sites need to be regulated as carefully as the games themselves.