William Hill parent says technical glitch that led to Nevada fine fixed

Matthew Calleja 1 year ago
William Hill parent says technical glitch that led to Nevada fine fixed

William Hill and its owner Caesars Entertainment say a technical glitch that affected thousands of wagers in Nevada has now been fixed and the company has also significantly improved its customer service standards. The companies have agreed to pay a $100,000 fine in response to a complaint by the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB).

William Hill’s internal investigation revealed a technical glitch from the past

The technical glitch plagued the company with wager duplications for around six years.

The issue impacted around 50,000 Nevada wagers, relating to the operator’s technical operations over a six-year period between 2015 and June 2021. William Hill has since returned all of the money erroneously received due to duplicated losing bets to the users. Winnings from successful duplicated bets have been recouped.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board has outlined the issues in a 12-page complaint.

Explaining how the technical glitch led to bet duplication, the complaint said: “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.”

Once the system became stable once more, every queue item would then process, including the multiple wager attempts. After a thorough internal investigation, William Hill discovered and resolved software flaws that duplicated wages for the same amount on the same event with the same odds within 60 seconds of the original wager.

William Hill resolved the technical glitch for good in June 2021, seeing no duplication issues since then.

Jeffrey Hendricks, senior vice president and assistant general counsel of regulatory and compliance for Caesars Entertainment Inc., owner of William Hill, appeared before the commission and apologized for the matters raised in the complaint, according to media reports.

He also told the commission that failures to address customer service issues when complaints began coming in from customers have also been addressed.

The company installed a chatbot to deal with customers from out of state and increased personnel to speak with clients in Nevada, The Las Vegas Review-Journal cited Hendrick as saying.

Since July, 99 percent of Nevada complaints have been addressed and 93 percent of them were acted on in 30 seconds or less.

Nevada gambling law and the NGC

Nevada gambling law dictates that operators must report any such issues to regulators within three days. As William Hill missed the deadline, the NGCB proposed the $100,000 fine.

The NGCB claims 55,000 bets were duplicated due to the error. About 42,000 of these wagers were losing bets, meaning William Hill erroneously received $1.3m. The operator has since returned all of that money to users. About 13,000 bets were successful, yielding $2m in winnings for users. All of these winnings have since been recouped by the sportsbook operator.

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