Former DraftKings employees say the company used AI and customer data to decide who should receive betting offers, including gamblers likely to spend more after receiving a promotion, according to a New York Times investigation.
\n\nThe company used an internal measure called “elasticity” to estimate whether an offer would lead someone to place more bets.
\n\n“Is this person going to give us more than we’re giving them?” former DraftKings data analyst Jayden Butts told the Times. “And if the answer is yes, open the floodgates.”
\n\nSix former employees who worked on the system told the Times they later regretted it.
\n\n“It is as predatory as it sounds,” one former analyst said. “If you lose more, we give you more, so you keep playing more.”
\n\nDraftKings rejected the allegations. The company told the Times that its promotions are “directed toward customers who demonstrate sustained, engaged use of our platform, not toward customers based on their losses.”
\n\nOne of the gamblers cited in the Times report, Bryan Biehl, said he lost nearly $70,000 betting online, more than half of it through DraftKings. He said the company’s offers made it harder to stop betting after he began treatment for gambling addiction in late…
Original source: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/
