Former Director Rebuck Aligned With NJ DGE On Making Bet365 Pay For Its Pricing Errors

As the lead regulator in New Jersey — the epicenter of legal, regulated gambling expansion in the U.S. — in late 2018 then-state Director of Gaming Enforcement David Rebuck spoke bluntly to the Global Gaming Expo conference in Las Vegas about how overseas-based sportsbooks are going to have to adjust to a different environment in his state.

Only a few weeks earlier, a sharp-eyed bettor at the FanDuel Sportsbook at the Meadowlands Racetrack had spotted a blunder in a live-odds offering late in a Broncos vs. Raiders NFL game that allowed him to claim a cool $82,000. FanDuel briefly resisted paying out, Rebuck said, until he reminded them of the rules of engagement in New Jersey.

“One thing we did do is we ended forever the European understanding that we have this ‘safe haven’ for mistakes they make,” Rebuck said during that speech. “In the U.S., our laws are different. We offer protections that are stronger for customers and consumers.

“There is no safe haven for companies that make mistakes, whether negligence or gross negligence — and there [are] consequences to that, so you’d better be better at what you’re doing, re-look at your internal controls, reduce your risk.”

But as it has turned out, some operators have taken longer than others to grasp these new terms.

A 180 on bet365

Rebuck’s former agency — he retired earlier in 2024 — recently announced that British-based sportsbook bet365 must refund $519,323.32 to almost 200 gamblers who received lower-than-expected payouts after bet365 initially decided there was “obvious error” in the listed odds and thus lesser payouts or complete voiding of bets were warranted.

“These types of multiple and serious violations cannot be tolerated in the New Jersey gaming regulatory system,” said agency Interim Director Mary Jo Flaherty, via Deputy Director Louis Rogacki, in a letter to bet365’s legal counsel.

Flaherty added that bet365 had engaged in “a prolonged and unacceptable course of conduct.”

Rebuck told Casino Reports on Thursday that in spite of these recently announced violations, “most operators have taken us seriously.” He suggested that the standard in the United Kingdom of allowing sportsbooks so much leeway in avoiding responsibility for faulty betting lines had led to a sense of complacency in some cases.

The violations do not come with any fines, Rebuck said — the mandate to pay out winning bettors is penalty enough, he said.

But there are occasional instances where the DGE will take the side of the sportsbook operator, Rebuck also said. As an example, he mentioned one sportsbook briefly posting odds on whether a three-yard field goal would be kicked in a particular football game. Since no such result was logistically possible, that wager was voided. But Rebuck offered another example where Kentucky was heavily favored in a college basketball game but the line mistakenly listed them as the underdog. While clearly an error, it was at least remotely conceivable that a bet on Kentucky could lose, so the operator had to pay the winning bettor.

“In each case, though, you can’t void anything without our permission,” Rebuck said, adding that this bet365 violation was far from the only six-figure correction imposed by the DGE over the past six years. 

Mistake after mistake

The first transgression by Bet365, according to the letter from DGE, occurred on Christmas Day 2020. It involved nine wagers by a single patron on the same international table tennis match during the COVID-19 pandemic era.

Just five days later, nine bettors had the winning side in a New York Jets vs. New England Patriots game.

The same issue arose with a May 2021 mixed martial arts bout; then in November 2021 on a Brigham Young vs. Oregon men’s college basketball game; on the North Carolina vs. Purdue and Delaware vs. Delaware State games that each took place just three days later; and later that same month on Southern Utah vs. Yale and UMass vs. Utah State contests.

The violations continued into 2022: Louisiana-Lafayette vs. Arkansas-Little Rock in February; a wager on whether Gonzaga would win its March Madness region; eight winning wagers on The Masters golf tournament in April; college baseball bets in June on North Carolina vs. Georgia; and a wager on a November NFL game between Green Bay and Tennessee.

The letter indicates that most of the violations were discovered during a “routine audit” undertaken by the division in April 2022.

“Once Bet365 accepted the wagers, even using odds it considered to be ‘incorrect,’ its only recourse was to seek Division permission to alter or void the wagers,” according to the letter.

Bet365 also was ordered to submit to the DGE a report on its efforts to correct previous failures of its internal systems.

“The actions of Bet365 by which it unilaterally voided wagers have been totally unacceptable,” per the letter from DGE.

Or as Rebuck put it more succinctly to Casino Reports: “Welcome to Jersey.”