Caesars Entertainment says a "back-end software issue" caused it to wrongly e-mail promotional gambling material to more than 250 "compulsive" online gamblers.
"The issue that caused our system to inadvertently target these patrons has been fixed and we have had no incidents since,” Seth Palansky, a vice president of the Caesars gambling empire, said in a statement. "We can assure the public that this lapse on our part was not an intentional targeting of these patrons, but simply a back-end software issue that failed to properly scrub our database before certain mailings."
New Jersey gaming regulators fined the company $10,000 for the mishap in what officials said Wednesday was the first monetary sanction of its kind following New Jersey implementing online gambling in November 2013.
The Division of Gaming Enforcement, according to local media, said that Caesars violated regulations when it e-mailed promotions earlier this year to 250-plus people on a so-called "self-exclusion" list that "allows compulsive gamblers to voluntarily ban themselves from Internet gambling or from playing in the brick-and-mortar casino hotels."
It's not the first time Caesars has been dinged in connection to compulsive gambling. In May, it was penalized $3,000 because it did not include in a legible manner the compulsive gambling "1-800-GAMBLER" phone hotline on billboards hawking online gambling.
Delaware, Nevada, and New Jersey are the nation's three states offering online gambling.
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