A New Jersey woman is suing DraftKings in New Jersey after her husband gambled away the family’s savings and rang up huge credit card expenses gambling on the site. Lisa D’Alessandro says her husband, who is only identified by his DraftKings user name Mdallo1990, lost almost $1 million gambling on DraftKings over the course of three years. In her suit, D’Alessandro alleges that DraftKings knew Mdallo1990 had a gambling problem but continued to encourage him to bet anyways.
When her husband started playing on DraftKings back in 2020, D’Alessandro says her husband never spent more than $3775 on the site in a single month. By 2023, sports betting was consuming as much as $125,000 of the household’s money each month. The problem with Mdallo1990’s spending, however, was that he was funding his gambling with his three children’s savings accounts and maxed out credit cards.
D’Alessandro’s attorney, Matthew Little described the situation in comments reported on by Yahoo!News saying, “You think you’re building a nest egg for yourself and your family, and it turns out it’s gone. This was a middle-class family. A lot of it remains on a credit card, and the rest of it is just gone.”
The lawsuit alleges that DraftKings VIP Hosts encouraged Mdallo1990 to keep gambling, even though they knew he was a problem gambler with several children to support. D’Alessandro also says that DraftKings violated its own policies by not verifying the source of her husband’s funds. Had they done so, they would have found that much of the money came from the children’s savings accounts and the maxed out credit cards. They would also have noticed that the player was annually wagering about four times his $175,000 income.
DraftKings has not yet commented on the case though they are in a pretty good legal position. Similar lawsuits against sports betting operators have been dismissed when the court found that they had no legal obligation to stop problem gamblers from spending beyond their means.