Fantasy sports operator fires employee for cheating in high-stakes game

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: Running back Aaron Jones and tight end Travis Kelce were subbed in, after deadline, for Raheem Mostert and Rashee Rice.

Those late substitutions were for contests that totaled stats for the entire playoffs so no payouts will be impacted since the cheating contestant was taken out, Ambrosius said.

"It was manually done by an employee who said he accidentally made the change," Ambrosius said. "We quickly figured it out. His excuse didn't hold water."

Before this incident, three company employees — one of them the fired worker — had the authority to make roster changes, according to Ambrosius. Now any such changes would result in an alert to seven senior company employees, he said.

"It's 20/20 but who would think someone would do something like this?" Ambrosius said. "It's insane."

The company did not identify the fired worker, who'd been employed since 2018.

Ambrosius wrote at length about the fired worker, describing him as a friend who went to an Ivy League school and has been struggling with an undisclosed "demon."

"He has been fired. His life has been ruined. His dream job is gone. He’s let everyone down," according to Ambrosius. "He’s let his kids, who he loves more than anything in this world, down. He let his wife, who he has been with since high school, down."

The platform founder said he texted the fired employee on Wednesday to "tell him that we all loved him and we all wanted to help him" but there was no immediate response.

"I heard that he wanted to reach out to me but just couldn’t do it. He was so ashamed of what he did, so embarrassed that he couldn’t talk to me," Ambrosius wrote. "I had just talked with him on Sunday and we talked about the Packers’ loss. Little did I know that would be the easiest loss of the weekend."

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com