Former Jaguars executive Amit Patel allegedly embezzled more than $22 million from the team. His lawyer blames it on a gambling addiction. He added that he spent most of that money gambling on sports.
Attorney Alex King said last week that Patel manipulated the team’s virtual credit card program “to gamble on Daily Fantasy Sports” with FanDuel and DraftKings, and that “approximately 99% of the misappropriated funds” were related to gambling losses.
Patel was the sole administrator of the team’s virtual credit card program and used the position to pass off personal purchases as business expenses, prosecutors allege.
More details have since come out as ESPN wrote Patel “was a high-volume, high-stakes daily fantasy sports player known for racking up big losses.”
The report says Patel was playing daily fantasy sports (DFS) under the username “ParlayPicker” on FanDuel and DraftKings.
Rotogrinders tracks individual players’ results and it shows ParlayPicker put nearly $500,000 into fantasy tournaments on the NFL, Major League Baseball, PGA Tour, and UFC since 2017, according to the report.
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“He often entered dozens of lineups into fantasy tournaments with large prize pools, the online records show. But DFS players familiar with the ParlayPicker account believe his biggest losses came from the high-stakes three-man contests they say he regularly entered. The contests were against elite competition and had buy-ins upward of $24,000. Rotogrinders does not track such contests, and the results and buy-in figures would not be included in its online records.”
Details of Patel’s betting outside of his daily fantasy play are unknown.
Drew Crawford, an avid DFS player, took notice of ParlayPicker and how he first started in 2017, and how his total stakes risked on fantasy tournaments peaked in 2021 and 2022.
“He came out of nowhere,” Crawford told ESPN. “Usually in our circle of DFS guys, we kind of know the identities of the guys who were playing at extreme volume. They’ve been around for a while. But with this guy, I remember having side conversations with some of my friends, who were like, ‘Who is this guy? And what is he doing?'”
He gained a quick reputation for his loose play and rookie mistakes. Another well-known fantasy player says ParlayPicker would “occasionally not even submit a lineup, despite it being a $3,000 buy-in.”
“My friend and I texted back and forth about how rich this guy must be,” Smith added.
One veteran DFS player said they believe ParlayPicker is “the biggest loser ever on FanDuel.”
“He was legendarily bad,” the person added.
The last tournament ParlayPicker entered that was tracked by Rotogrinders was DraftKings’ world golf championship in July, which was five months after Jags fired him.
The buy-in was $29,000 and ParlayPicker finished tied for 129th out of 150 finalists.
