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David Purdum, ESPN Staff Writer
An employee for a fantasy football website has been fired for being involved in a cheating scandal during a prestigious NFL playoffs tournament with a six-figure first prize.
The National Fantasy Football Championship acknowledged Wednesday in a post on its website that an employee used internal controls to make advantageous changes to a contestant’s roster after games had kicked off, including swapping in a player who had already scored a touchdown.
“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,” wrote NFFC founder Greg Ambrosius, a fantasy sports industry veteran.
“As a result of its internal investigation, an employee was terminated and a contest participant has been banned from further play on our platforms.”
SportsHub is the parent company for the National Fantasy Football Championship, a longtime tournament operator. The names of the employee and the contestant involved have not been revealed by the company.
The Hold ‘Em contest featured a $150,000 first prize and attracted 1,521 entries. Among the contestants was a group of fantasy players featured on the “Ship Chasing” podcast; they first spotted the issue and brought it to the attention of the tournament operators.
Pete Overzet, 36, an experienced fantasy football player, said his group found the issue while attempting to differentiate its roster from the lineup of the contestant in question.
“It wouldn’t have stood out unless you were intimately familiar with how that contest works,” Overzet told ESPN.
“I think this is incredibly damaging [to the fantasy industry],” he added. “We’re in an era where people want to jump to conspiracy theories. Now, not only do you know that It can occur, but it did occur, I think that’s going to spread the seeds of distrust.”
The contestant, according to the NFFC, swapped one player in both the wild card and divisional rounds of the playoffs, moves that were worth approximately 20 points each to the entry, which was in fourth place after Sunday’s games.
An hour into the second of two wild-card games on Jan. 20, the user switched Dolphins running back Raheem Mostert for Packers running back Aaron Jones. In the first game, Mostert rushed for 33 yards on eight carries in Miami’s loss to the Chiefs. Jones got off to a hot start against the 49ers in the late game and finished with 108 yards rushing in the Packers’ loss.
The next week, in the divisional round, the same contestant switched out Chiefs receiver Rashee Rice for Travis Kelce — after the Kansas City star tight end scored a touchdown in their win over the Bills, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation.
The contestant was disqualified from the tournament, which will continue.
“Nothing is more important than the integrity of a pay-to-play contest,” Ambrosius told ESPN in a phone interview Thursday. “We have built up 20-plus years of integrity through transparency and everything we’ve done. And by one action, it’s put all of it in question. It’s put me and everybody associated with our company in question.
“We’re doing everything we can to make sure that we know everything about what happened, let people know, and to make sure it never happens again.”