North Carolina Fines Underdog $175K, bet365 $75K Over Compliance Lapses
The North Carolina State Lottery Commission has fined Underdog $175,000 and bet365 $75,000 for separate responsible-gaming and compliance violations, according to reporting from Covers and SportsBettingDime. Both operators self-reported the underlying errors to regulators and cooperated with the resulting investigations, and both fines center on failures to properly gate or protect specific categories of customers rather than any dispute over how bets themselves were settled.
What Underdog was fined for
Underdog's $175,000 fine stems from an age-and-identity verification failure that allowed 38 underage accounts to be created on its North Carolina sportsbook, 8 of which went on to place bets before the issue was caught. Underdog exited the North Carolina sports betting market in December 2025 — described as a business decision, and the only state where the company had offered a traditional licensed sportsbook — though it continues to operate its daily fantasy sports product there. The company self-reported the verification failure to regulators.
What bet365 was fined for
bet365's $75,000 fine relates to its self-exclusion program: the operator sent promotional push notifications to accounts enrolled in North Carolina's self-exclusion list, and a technical issue was found to have kept the self-exclusion list from being fully applied to the platform for a period of time. bet365 self-reported the error, fixed the underlying technical issue, and said it has since added employee training and updated its internal procedures to prevent a recurrence.
Why it matters to North Carolina bettors
North Carolina only launched legal mobile sports betting in March 2024, making it one of the newer regulated markets in the country, and these fines are a reminder that the state's Lottery Commission is actively auditing licensed operators' age-verification and self-exclusion systems rather than treating them as a one-time launch checkbox. For bettors, the self-exclusion piece is the more directly relevant one: self-exclusion is meant to be a hard technical barrier once a player enrolls, and this case shows regulators will fine an operator even when a lapse is inadvertent, self-reported, and quickly fixed. Both penalties are relatively modest by industry standards, but they add to a pattern of state regulators treating responsible-gaming compliance as an ongoing obligation rather than a formality.