ProPublica is trying to answer a question that no regulator publishes data for: when does a sports betting app encourage a customer to keep playing, and when does it warn them to stop? To answer it, the newsroom is asking bettors to upload their own transaction histories from FanDuel and DraftKings. It wants at least 250. As of its 26 September publication, 14 people had sent theirs.
That gap is the story. The events ProPublica wants on the record — deposit bonuses and boosts, invitations into VIP programs, responsible-gaming notices — happen inside privately held systems. There is no public register of who got a boost, no disclosure of the betting patterns that preceded a VIP invitation, and no published threshold that triggers a warning. The industry reports revenue and handle in detail; it does not report its own customer interactions. Without the customer-side record, the only version of how these apps behave is the one the operators describe themselves.
Three ways to hand over your history, and only some of them are open to you
ProPublica lists three routes, and the differences between them are informative.
The preferred one is its own browser extension, which logs into a FanDuel or DraftKings account on a computer and exports the history. It works only in Chrome and Firefox, and is not yet in either browser’s store, so it has to be loaded temporarily. ProPublica says the tool collects no personally identifying information.
The second is a formal data request filed with FanDuel or DraftKings under state privacy law. That route is “available only to people who live in states with certain privacy laws” — the right to see your own betting record depends on where you live. ProPublica adds that users have told it the companies have taken more than 30 days to comply.
The third is exporting a CSV from a third-party tracker such as Pikkit, which is limited to people who were already tracking their bets elsewhere.
Each route takes five to ten minutes and requires a desktop, not a phone.
The tool’s terms say the app may close your account for using it
The extension’s disclaimer includes a line worth reading twice: “Using this tool is at your own risk. Your betting app may terminate your service as a result.” It disclaims liability for claims including “alleged violations of third-party terms of service,” caps ProPublica’s total liability at five dollars, and is governed by New York law.
So a customer trying to obtain their own transaction history is told, by the newsroom helping them, that the operator may end their account over it. ProPublica also states that submitted files go only to its newsroom, are not shared with the sportsbooks, and that names and email addresses are not published; a reporter gets in touch before writing about any individual case.
Why the method is crowdsourcing
The absence of a documentary trail is not an accident of this particular inquiry. Gambling regulation in the United States runs largely through state licensing, self-reported compliance and internal responsible-gaming programs, and the resulting record is thin by design: operators publish the existence of responsible-gaming tools, not how often they fire or for whom. ProPublica is also asking people who have worked in the industry to answer a questionnaire or make contact on Signal — another route that exists because the internal record cannot be reached by public-records request.
The campaign follows the newsroom’s earlier experiment in which a reporter deliberately bet like a problem gambler and was invited into DraftKings’ VIP program. That piece established one account’s sequence. The uploader is an attempt to see whether the sequence generalises across hundreds of them — which is the difference between an anecdote and a pattern, and the reason the shortfall from 14 to 250 matters.
This is a description of a reporting campaign in progress, not a set of findings. The 14-of-250 figure and the 30-day waits are ProPublica’s own account of its project.