A man is suing betting site DraftKings after he gambled away all of the money that he had saved for his wedding and lost his job as a result.
Dane Miller, a 32-year-old groom-to-be from Chicago, is suing gambling site DraftKings in federal court. He has accused them of ignoring signs of his addiction and instead accelerating it by eliminating safeguards.
Miller’s complaint says that DraftKings realized the potential in his custom and offered him many lucrative perks, promotions, free bets, and profit boosts to fuel his habit.
The site crowned Miller a VIP
As a result of the perks he was granted for being a “VIP”, Miller contends his casual play rapidly accelerated. He soon gambled away his wedding fund, before taking out credit card advances, personal loans and dipping into his 401k.
Miller lost his job as a result of his addiction and, at the height of it, was hospitalized with severe suicidal ideation. The complaint states that DraftKings sent Miller five $200 sports book credits to try and lure him back to the site and, immediately after being discharged from the hospital, he relapsed and reinstalled the app.
Miller’s complaint states that the website “defectively designed its product to take advantage of the chemical reward system of users’ brains.
As per The Independent, the complaint accuses the site of anticipating users’ “emotional vulnerability” and employing “personalized algorithms [that] reinforce illusions of control, buttress loss aversion, and encourage the user to chase their losses.”
A similar story occurred in 2024, when a federal lawsuit accused gambling site DraftKings of nurturing the gambling addiction of a father in New Jersey, causing him to drain nearly $1 million from his, his wife’s and his children’s savings accounts.
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Miller is now in recovery, having regained employment. He says he hopes to warn others so that they don’t endure what he experienced.
For more on gambling, check out our coverage of the AI that developed a gambling addiction, or the Polymarket user who lost $1 million in a World Cup bet.
