A struggling gaming company tried to destroy its rivals by creating a fake website to solicit complaints: court documents

The allegations were made in a counterclaim filed to court Monday by one of those competitors, Papaya Games. Papaya says 4 Fair Play was a fraudulent organization built by a consulting firm Skillz retained. While 4 Fair Play purported to “bring fairness to mobile gaming” by promoting “fair policies” and pushing state attorneys generals to investigate gaming companies, its true purpose was to target Skillz’s rivals, Papaya alleges.

4FairPlay.org, the organization’s website, is no longer active. A screenshot of the site included as a court exhibit includes a pie chart that purports to show mobile games with the “highest complaints.” It includes games produced by Papaya and Avia, another leading mobile games company — but not Skillz itself.

A request for comment to an email address affiliated with 4fairplay.org wasn’t immediately returned.

The legal wrangling shines a light into a vicious battle to dominate a relatively unsexy — but significant — corner of the gaming industry.

Games like 21 Blitz, Solitaire Cash, and Bingo Cash aren’t as buzzy as the latest Pokemon and Grand Theft Auto offerings. But they form a popular slice of the mobile gaming market, which was valued at nearly $150 billion in 2023, according to Straits Research.

These casino-style games are based on skill, but they appear similar to gambling, which is highly regulated.

Skillz Inc, formed in 2012, was once one of the biggest players in the casino-style game space. Instead of developing games itself, it differentiated itself by being a platform for other developers to create games in the Apple and Android app stores.

The company peaked in 2021 with $384 million in sales, according to Bloomberg News. It has been on a downward slide since, public securities filings show. Its share price has plummeted from nearly $900 per share in February 2021 to about $6 per share today.

Papaya is privately held and doesn’t disclose its finances. In a statement Monday, a spokesperson for Papaya said Skillz “has engaged in a pattern of tortious and deceptive conduct.”

“The counterclaims describe how — with its business performing poorly — Skillz embarked on a deceitful campaign against Papaya by falsely claiming that Skillz is a virtuous crusader for fairness while accusing others of the same type of deceitful conduct they are engaging in themselves,” the spokesperson said.

4 Fair Play helped people file complaints with their state attorney general

The 4 Fair Play website told visitors that games developed by Papaya were “scams” and provided form complaints for people to send to their state attorneys general.

“A successful investigation could force the companies to pay consumers for damages,” the website read. “Make sure you are one of them!”

4 Fair Play didn’t provide forms for complaints about games distributed by Skillz, according to Papaya’s countersuit.

According to Papaya’s filing, the website included a counter saying tens of thousands of players filed complaints.

But each time a visitor navigated to the page, the counter said exactly 12,594 people filed complaints — no matter when they visited. It then ticked upward every few seconds.

The counter wasn’t linked to any kind of live database, according to Papaya’s filing.

“The source code of the 4FairPlay Website shows that the initial complaint figure and the rate of the increase were chosen by Skillz,” the filing alleges.

According to Papaya — citing documents obtained through court proceedings in other litigation — the 4 Fair Play website was created by an organization retained by a person named Josh Levin, who controls a consulting organization called Square Strategies LLC, which was in turn paid over $75,000 by Skillz. A Skillz executive provided comments on the 4 Fair Play website design, according to screenshots of a website mockup included as a court exhibit.

Levin declined to comment on the filing.

A Skillz spokesperson told Business Insider after this article was initially published that the company was a “founding supporter” of 4 Fair Play. It also reiterated claims made in a lawsuit it filed against Papaya, accusing the rival company of fraud.

“Skillz is a founding supporter of 4FairPlay and supports their work,” the spokesperson said. “It is not surprising that a company accused of committing fraud responded by attacking a website that was committed to exposing fraud.”

Papaya’s allegations came in a counterclaim to the lawsuit originally brought by Skillz in March.

Papaya’s games allow users to play against other users and win cash. To quickly match players of similar skill levels, the games need large user bases.

According to Skillz’s suit, Papaya stole market share by often pitting real-life users against bots rather than real-life users. And by using bots, Skillz also alleges, Papaya tricked its players into participating in illegal gambling — where victory is based on chance — rather than a legal skill-based game. Skillz has made similar allegations against other competitors in other lawsuits.

In court filings, Papaya says it uses bots only in tutorials and not actual gameplay. But it said in Monday’s counterclaim that Skillz games, however, do use bots.

The filing pointed to Skillz’s own developer documentation, which includes a “utilizing bots in gameplay” section.

“It is clear that Skillz’s repeated and highly publicized presentation of its platform as ‘never’ incorporating bots is false and deceptive,” the filing alleges.

This story has been updated with a response from Skillz.