USA Online Sports Gambling Laws

December 11, 2008

When entering the world of online sports gambling, a lot of us stop and ask ourselves this question, “Am I doing something illegal?” Well in most of countries, the federal government has laws which indicate if it is legal or not to participate in online sports gambling. These laws are dependent entirely upon the country but most of the countries in the European Union have a clear stance that online gambling is allowed. The United States of American has laws that are more muddled and it can be hard to find a clear answer as to whether gambling is legal. Before actually getting into the laws themselves, let’s first look at who regulates sports betting.

In the US the regulating of online gambling was controlled completely by each state, however at present this is not so anymore. With the introduction of online gambling there has been a misperception of authority. Therefore the question is, “who is in charge of making and enforcing the laws of cyberspace?” Now keep in mind that there was sports’ gambling long before it was made available via the internet so the plan was to simply apply these same laws when online sports gambling was introduced, however this was left open to extensive clarification.

Even though the US government has passed several laws prohibiting online sports gambling, the operators of these online casinos have found a way to work around these laws. What they do is, they go offshore to others countries/states which allow online gambling and provide their services to the US citizens from there. I know what you are probably asking, “is this legal?” well to be honest it probably is not but there are no present laws which prohibit this activity, so it will continue to happen. There have been attempts though to pass bills which consider this type of activity illegal, however they have all failed. Even though there are federal laws on gambling in the US, the government has decided to leave all the authority to the individual states.

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