William Hill US and its parent company Caesars Entertainment will likely be fined $100,000 by the Nevada Gaming Commission (NGC) during the regulator’s meeting on Thursday, September 22.
The William Hill Race & Sports Book at the Plaza Hotel & Casino. An online processing error on the William Hill app in Nevada wrongly duplicated bets for many bettors. William Hill has agreed to a $100,000 fine with the Nevada Gaming Commission for the regulatory failures. (Image: Las Vegas Review-Journal)
Caesars acquired William Hill, one of the largest bookmakers in the UK and Europe, in 2020 for about $3.7 billion. Caesars last year sold William Hill’s non-US operations to 888 Holdings for $765 million.
Most William Hill sportsbooks in the US have since been rebranded Caesars Sportsbooks. But Caesars has kept the William Hill brand operational in Nevada and Florida.
Gaming regulators in Nevada say a glitch in William Hill’s technical operations that first arose back in 2015 and lasted through June 2021 affected at least 50,000 bets in Nevada. The Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) said in a 12-page complaint against the sportsbook that the company failed to notify the state regarding an online malfunction that wrongly duplicated customers’ bets.
NGCB officials said when customers told William Hill of the erred duplicated bets, the company did not immediately notify the Board or Commission about the malfunctions.
Settlement Agreed
The Nevada Gaming Control Board, which reports and makes disciplinary recommendations to the NGC, claims William Hill since 2015 has repeatedly refunded bets that were wrongly duplicated. But state gaming regulations mandate that such a glitch be reported within three days to state regulators, something William Hill did not do, the NGCB complaint alleges.
William Hill and Caesars have agreed to the $100,000 penalty suggested by the NGCB. With the NGCB recommending to the Nevada Gaming Commission that the penalty satisfy the complaint, it’s largely expected that Caesars will be formally issued the fine during tomorrow’s meeting.
William Hill says its CBS Race and Sports Book’s online wagering application was the faulty party responsible for duplicating the bets. The company said impatient online bettors and a sometimes lethargic network are to blame.
When the system was under load, the queue that holds the wagers would back up and a patron who placed an initial wager would see a processing message, become impatient, exit the application, and attempt the same wager again,” the NGCB complaint detailed. “When the system eventually stabilized, all items in the queue would be processed by the system, including the multiple wager attempts by the patron.”
William Hill told the NGCB last month that a “system patch” had since resolved the glitch. The patch was deployed in June 2021 and no complaints of duplicated bets have since been reported.
55K Wrong Bets
The NGCB complaint alleges that some 55,000 bets were wrongly duplicated because of the network malfunction. The majority — about 42,000 bets — lost resulting in William Hill wrongly taking $1.3 million in customer money that has since been returned.
But William Hill said around 13,000 erroneous duplicated wagers won to incorrectly deliver bettors about $2 million. That money was since been recouped by the bookmaker.
The post William Hill Agrees to $100K Fine for Regulatory Shortcomings in Nevada appeared first on Casino.org.
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