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A former Connecticut funeral director who stole clients’ prepayments to fund his excessive gambling habit will spend the next seven and a half years in state prison.
Philip Pietras, 52, admitted to stealing from more than 170 people, many of whom are senior citizens who sought to limit the emotional and financial burdens placed on their loved ones by prepaying for their funerals. But instead of placing those funds, meant for caskets and burial services, in escrow accounts, Pietras pocketed the money to gamble.
Pietras accepted a plea deal from the state, and prosecutors expect him to enter a guilty plea on Oct. 23 and be formally sentenced on Jan. 22, 2027.
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FutureSports has inked a deal with Major League Baseball (MLB) to launch performance-based financial indexes for all 30 MLB franchises, marking the company’s latest expansion into professional sports markets.
As part of the accord, MLB will supply FutureSports with official league data “that the company will use to create new broad-based CME FutureSports Performance Indexes (FSPI)” on each MLB team. Financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.
CME Group (NASDAQ: CME) and the index provider announced a partnership in July. With the MLB deal in place, the exchange operator will offer derivatives based on the baseball indexes.
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Malta’s gambling regulator has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) gaming charter after finding that governance is struggling to keep pace as the technology becomes more widely used across the sector.
The Malta Gaming Authority (MGA), working alongside the Malta Digital Innovation Authority (MDIA), drafted the voluntary charter following extensive surveys and interviews with industry licensees.
That study found that AI adoption across the gambling industry remained uneven. It highlighted customer support, data analytics, fraud detection, and responsible gaming as areas where the technology was already being heavily used.
