The operator of a high-stakes fantasy football platform fired an Ivy League-educated employee who allegedly cheated for a player by manipulating digital timestamps, the company said Friday.
The National Fantasy Football Championship, which hosts a slew of games each week, some with six-digit payoffs, said it was tipped off by the podcast Ship Chasing about a time-bending scam that was traced to a now-former worker.
“To see someone puncture that integrity that I have in the industry just hurts so badly,” NFFC founder Greg Ambrosius told NBC News on Friday.
“There’s nothing more important for a fantasy game than integrity. We have given away $93 million in prize money since 2004 and everyone has been been able to trust us.”
Fantasy contests typically involve participants selecting football players from a set number of positions on the field. Contest participants are awarded points for their players in categories such as rushing, passing and receiving yards and touchdowns scored.
The platform owned by SportsHub Holdings “publishes timestamps for each transaction in each of its contests” and these markers “are viewable to every participant to see for every contest,” according to Ambrosius.
Thus, the most basic and most obvious way to cheat would be by manipulating a timestamp and inserting a football player into a contestant’s lineup after that athlete had already gained big yards or scored.
“Recently, with help from reporting by a public source, we successfully revealed a post-deadline move in one of our NFFC Post-Season Hold ’Em contests that was detected and quickly confirmed, resulting in SportsHub being able to take immediate action to resolve the issue without any impact to the results of the contest,” Ambrosius wrote in a lengthy post earlier this week.
“As a result of its internal investigation, an employee was terminated and a contest participant has been banned from further play on our platforms.”
Among the late, impermissible changes found by the company:…
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