A fantasy football website announced this week that one of its employees has been fired over a cheating scandal that took place during a tournament that has a six-figure prize.
The National Fantasy Football Championship announced on Wednesday that an investigation determined that one of its employees used internal controls to make changes to a contestant’s roster after games had kicked off. The changes were made during the Wild Card and Divisional rounds of the NFL playoffs.
“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,” NFFC founder Greg Ambrosius wrote in a post, via ESPN’s David Purdum. “As a result of its internal investigation, an employee was terminated and a contest participant has been banned from further play on our platforms.”
The contest has 1,521 entires and features a $150,000 prize for first place. A group of entrants from the “Ship Chasing” podcast alerted tournament organizers to the illegal activity. NFFC says the employee who was fired swapped out one player in the Wild Card round and one player in the Divisional Round, resulting in roughly 40 additional points for the contestant. The contestant was in fourth place after last weekend’s games.
The first change came when the employee switched out Miami Dolphins running back Raheem Mostert for Green Bay Packers running back Aaron Jones on Jan. 20. Mostert had just 33 yards in a loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, while Jones exploded for 118 rushing yards and 3 touchdowns against the Dallas Cowboys.
In the Divisional Round the following week, the employee switched out Chiefs wide receiver Rashee Rice for tight end Travis Kelce. That change came after Kelce scored a touchdown in a win over the Buffalo Bills.
The contestant’s team has been disqualified from the tournament and the ex-NFFC employee has been fired. The tournament will continue, with Ambrosius telling ESPN that organizers are doing everything they can to make sure something like that never happens again.
