In February the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) levied a fine on an online gambling company after self-excluded players racked up severe losses when they were allowed to continue gambling.
The DGE issued a civil penalty of $36,000 to NYX Digital (Scientific Games) in a settlement that arose from a violation of its player protection rules. According to the regulator’s official website, the complaint was filed in November last year.
NYX Digital provides online casino gambling through Atlantic City’s Resorts Casino Hotel and its two websites, ResortsCasino.com and MoheganSunCasino.com.
The complaint said that on February 14 of last year a report was made by a patron to Resorts Digital that although on January 26 they had self-excluded from MoheganSunCasino.com, they could still play at ResortsCasino.com.
According to the DGE, the operator’s software was missing a critical piece of programming that was made available on October 10, 2018 “which included code to support adding self-excluded individuals to the Division’s self-excluded list by operator/skin”.
If a person is on a self-exclusion list, that person should not be able to play on any type of gambling platform. The failure of the software in question meant any person that self-excluded on MoheganSunCasino.com was not added to the New Jersey list.
Nine self-excluded players were adversely impacted by the glitch, according to the state. All nine of those players have since been added to the list manually after NYX Digital “successfully deployed an emergency fix”.
Of those nine players, five of them had combined losses of $31,060 “playing on other platforms” between October 10, 2018 to February 16, 2019 when they should have been blocked from all gambling sites. Two of the players accrued losses of over $29,000.
One of the players was self-excluded on January 27, 2019 on MoheganSun.com and lost $13,762 on other gaming platforms in only a few weeks. A similar thing happened to another player who self-excluded on December 9, 2018 and then afterwards lost $16,099.
The regulations for gambling in New Jersey state that players are not able to recoup any of the losses they incur.