On Sunday, a 28-year-old Hollywood assistant named Seth plans to enjoy the Super Bowl in the same way millions of other football fans will: He’ll bet on it.
How, exactly, will he wager that $100 burning a
hole in his pocket? One thing he knows for sure is that he won’t do it legally.
Trekking to Vegas for the weekend is out of the question. And he won’t do it
using one of the publicly traded online services based abroad that have been
taking sports bets from Americans over the past few years. They have mostly
stopped taking action from U.S. residents in the wake of an aggressive
government crackdown on Internet wagering.
But that doesn’t mean he and other gamblers will
be shut out. In fact, the government’s war against illegal online wagering may
be driving gamblers back to where they started: their local bookie. And in an
ironic twist, there’s a good chance the bookmaker is taking bets over the
Internet, too.
“Even my bookie is online these days,” says
Seth. He would be logging in to place his bet but misplaced the username and
password the bookmaker gave him. “I guess I’ll just have to call him and get
him to resend me the instructions, sort of a tech support for the sports
bettor,” he says.
The government’s crackdown has, in recent
months, targeted executives at offshore Internet-gambling Togel outfits
and the foreign credit-card-processing companies that facilitate the
transactions with U.S. bettors. But while it may have dented the
$12-billion-a-year online-gambling industry, it didn’t break it.
No one thinks that American gamblers’ appetites
have waned either. Last year, about $94.5 million was legally wagered on the
Super Bowl in Nevada casinos, the only place in the land where it’s lawful to
bet on sports. Illegally, the American Gaming Association — a casino-industry
trade group — figures that Americans bet between $5 billion and $6 billion each
year on football’s marquee
event.
“The likely impact is that people who previously
wagered on legal, regulated sites … will now call a local bookie or bet on an
unregulated site,” says Alan Feldman, a spokesman for casino giant MGM Mirage.
It’s true that many of the publicly traded
online-gambling sites have pulled out of the U.S. market since last summer.
Some have folded entirely. And the Justice Department served subpoenas to a
number of investment banks that allegedly helped underwrite foreign
public-stock offerings for some of the companies.
But as the kickoff at Super Bowl XLI in Miami
gets nearer, the overall picture of Internet gambling has only gotten muddier.
It’s not just that local bookies are taking bets over the Internet. For every
established Internet-gambling company that has stopped accepting bets from the
U.S., others have cropped up to fill the void.
“The online-gambling ban should be renamed
the Sopranos Support Bill,” says Wayne Allyn Root, an outspoken professional
sports handicapper in Las Vegas. “All of this money has moved to brand-new,
privately held companies [that] opened overnight and [are] run by criminals
engaging in fraud and organized crime.”
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