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The financial implications for ordinary households are not academic. Up to twenty-three million Americans carry debt attributable to gambling, according to Debt.org. Approximately twenty percent of problem gamblers file for bankruptcy due to gambling debts. Up to fifty percent of individuals with severe gambling disorder engage in criminal activity — theft, fraud — to support their habit. The World Cup, arriving in the summer of 2026 with its thirty-nine days of continuous betting opportunities and its aggressive promotional campaigns targeting first-time bettors, will produce some number of people who did not have a gambling problem in June and do by August. The industry knows this. It has built its business model around it.

VI.

What the Industry Understood, and When

There is a document that surfaces repeatedly in the sports betting litigation now making its way through American courts: the internal product specification. It is a category of corporate record, familiar to anyone who has studied the history of tobacco or social media, that reveals the gap between what a company says to regulators and what its engineers are told to build. In the DraftKings and FanDuel cases, the emerging picture is of platforms that deployed, with considerable sophistication, the tools of behavioral economics against their own users.

The complaint against DraftKings filed in Pennsylvania in mid-2025 alleged that the platform used algorithms to identify users exhibiting signs of addiction and then offered them targeted credits and promotions — not as a customer-service gesture, but as a retention mechanism. The Baltimore city lawsuit alleged that both DraftKings and FanDuel used "personalized algorithms, targeted promotions and retention tactics to exploit vulnerable users." The pattern alleged in lawsuit after lawsuit is consistent: users who show restraint or success receive less attention; users who chase losses receive VIP Managers and bonus credits and push notifications at 11 p.m.

The most recent lawsuits, filed in early June 2026, went further. Two plaintiffs alleged that after they began showing signs of problem gambling — irregular session lengths, escalating wagers, behavioral patterns that the companies' own algorithms would have flagged — they received tailored promotional offers rather than intervention. The companies, the complaints allege, had access to the data that would have identified these users as at risk and chose, as a business decision, to monetize them instead.