Is Online Gambling Legal in the US

Is online gambling legal in the US is probably the question on the mind of the majority of online gamblers. This particular question however is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, as the question of is online gambling legal in the US is a complicated subject. The answer to this question would depend solely on one factor and that is the circumstances. Online gambling is divided into sections and each section has its own laws which would determine if the process is illegal or not, therefore this article is going to highlight a couple of these laws which may be able to answer our question.

Lets first deal with the players, there is no federal law which prevents individuals from playing online. A US lawyer stated in court that by simply placing wagers online was not illegal, however the players may run afoul of their state laws but that situation occurring is quite rare. There is in fact record of only one case of this happening – the individual was from North Dakota, however he only paid a small fine. The second section we would deal with is small ad publishers taking advertisements. Again just like the players these small publishers have little to fear. Even though there were cases whereby publishers were fined, it was only big name publishers like Yahoo and Google so even though they had a small fine to pay it did not affect them in any major way. As for the other smaller publishers they were simply warned, however they were not required to pay any fines. And of the small publishers there has been no record of them being warned to stop taking online gambling ads, so far. So far I have answered only part of the question of is online gambling legal in the US, so let’s continue right along.

The third section we will look at is the advertisers who promote their sport books in traditional media, for instance, magazines or billboards, can face scrutiny as operators. However sports books have never been scrutinized for advertising online. In addition, online casinos, affiliates and poker rooms have never faced any scrutiny for purchasing these ads, in any medium. The fourth section is the operators. These operators have no trouble once they are based outside the US, remain outside the US and deal specifically with casino / poker wages. Offshore sports books could face charges if they advertise on billboards or receive wagers by means of the telephone. So you can clearly understand now, why I mentioned at the beginning of my article that we can not give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the question of is online gambling legal in the US.

In closing though there are a few things you must keep in mind about this article, it only focuses on the federal laws of the US, therefore you would need to find out the laws of whichever state you reside in. another point is the laws are constantly changing so you would need to be aware of the changes. Even though you are reading this article to seek information on the subject of is online gambling legal in the US you need to speak with a lawyer as I have only touched the surface of each section to give you a summarized version of the laws.

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Tags: Gambling, Legal, Online

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 8:09 am and is filed under Online Gambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.