Massachusetts Court denies motion to dismiss class action suit filed against DraftKings
PHAI filed the suit last December alleging that the operator’s $1,000 signup bonus was an unfair and deceptive marketing practice and constituted false advertising.
On August 21, a court in Boston, Massachusetts released its decision regarding DraftKings’ motion to dismiss a class action suit filed by the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI). The court denied the operator’s motion to dismiss, with the next hearing for the case set for December 10, 2024.
In December of 2023, PHAI, located at the Northeastern University School of Law, filed the class action suit alleging that DraftKings’ $1,000 signup bonus was an “unfair and deceptive marketing practice and constituted false advertising.”
“This decision will allow the case to proceed to the discovery phase, where we have the opportunity to depose those involved with the deceptive promotion and collect internal communications to gain insight into how it was developed and executed,” PHAI Executive Director Mark Gottlieb said.
“Sports gambling carries enough risks without adding false advertising and deceptive promotions to dupe customers into signing up.”
In 2014, PHAI formed the Center for Public Health Litigation, a nonprofit law firm, which uses the civil justice system in an attempt to improve public health by focusing on litigation targeting tobacco industry products, unhealthy foods, deceptive health marketing and deceptive gambling practices.
“This bogus promotion, designed to lure customers into an addictive trap, required new users to risk large amounts of money and gamble hundreds of dollars, each and every day, to qualify for credits that could only be used for more gambling. We think this will be an easy case to prove,” PHAI President Richard Daynard said.
Within the lawsuit, it states that users were not aware that, to qualify for the $1,000 sign-up bonus, new customers needed to make an initial deposit of $5,000.
Players would then need to gamble $25,000 on certain qualifying bets over a certain time period and, after all that was done, they would receive non-withdrawable credits to use on the DraftKings Sportsbook platform.
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