Florida attorney Jennifer Hoekstra has filed 15 lawsuits against FanDuel and DraftKings alleging that their sports-betting apps are deliberately designed to addict users. The claims focus on app features and customer-retention practices including push notifications, bonus alerts, personalised outreach and VIP programmes.
Hoekstra said she represented people who had lost “their houses and their spouses and their kids” through gambling, CBS News reported. She compared the cases with litigation over social media platforms, saying the betting products used “the same type of workflow” and “the same type of notifications,” creating what she called a similar addiction.
The lawsuits draw on a legal theory used in a California social-media case decided in March. A jury found Meta and YouTube negligent and awarded damages of $4.2 million and $1.8 million respectively; Hoekstra said she is adapting the argument that platform design itself can be addictive and harmful. Her firm had been involved in an earlier court victory against Meta.
The allegations concern a gambling market in which 38 states legalised sports gambling after the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that opened the way for state-by-state legalisation. American Gaming Association data showed that $167 billion was wagered online last year.
Operators use both automated and personal tactics to retain bettors, including perks such as luxury-suite access, signed jerseys and exclusive fan experiences for VIP customers. Esteban Ruiz-Haynes said a FanDuel manager texted him about forthcoming games and sent a birthday message after he became a VIP; he said he wagered between $80,000 and $120,000 annually with the company.
Louis Ruggiero, a podcast host, said FanDuel offered him VIP status after he lost $100,000 over three months. “The incentives got bigger. The outreach got more personal. The losses got deeper,” he said. Ruggiero also recalled placing a $10,000 bet on a Knicks-Pelicans game while holding his three-hour-old newborn son in hospital, saying: “I couldn’t stop.”
A former FanDuel employee said that the company could monitor customer activity, including when betting was falling away, and that customers taking breaks were often sent push notifications intended to bring them back. The former employee described interventions as “less about cutting them off than slowing them down,” adding: “It’s never forever.”
Hoekstra alleges such notifications create a persistent “ambient presence” in users’ lives, inviting them to re-engage during boredom, stress, financial anxiety or emotional vulnerability. She characterised the mechanism simply as “the dopamine hit.”
FanDuel rejected the allegation that it failed to address harmful gambling. It said that “any claim that we don’t aggressively take actions to monitor and curb problem behavior is completely false.” The company said it had about 18 million customers, invested $158 million in responsible gaming last year and removed 5,700 people from its platform because of gambling behaviour.
DraftKings said it could not comment on pending litigation but took responsible-engagement concerns seriously. It said all employees receive annual training, and that its chief responsible gaming officer reports to the chief executive and leads a team of more than 50 full-time staff. The operator also pointed to its My Budget Builder and My Stat Sheet tools, alongside customer-set limits on deposits, wagers, time and losses.
Joe Maloney, president of the Sports Betting Alliance, called cases such as Ruggiero’s outliers and said most people gamble responsibly online. “It is for entertainment. It is not for wealth creation,” he said. The trade group said operators offer tools including deposit, wager and loss limits.
The broader evidence on financial harm points to risks associated with easy access. UCLA researchers, analysing credit data for roughly 7 million consumers, found average credit scores fell by about 0.8 points after sports-gambling legalisation and by 2.75 points where online or mobile gambling became available. The study associated the decline with greater debt burdens, including higher bankruptcy, collections, debt-consolidation borrowing and auto-loan delinquency; its effects in online-gambling states appeared roughly two years after legalisation.
A National Council on Problem Gambling survey conducted in April 2024 found that 8% of US adults, or almost 20 million people, had experienced at least one potentially problematic gambling behaviour “many times” during the previous year. That proportion was down from 11% in 2021 and matched the 2018 level of 7% more closely; the council said the survey was not designed to measure gambling disorders under the DSM-5 definition and suggested the 2021 peak may have reflected the Covid-19 pandemic more than the spread of sports betting.
