Perhaps one of the more frequently asked questions by both new and regular bettors – Is online sports betting legal in the U.S.? For those who have an interest in taking their sports betting action to an offshore sportsbook but are not sure whether the feds are going to come busting through the door after spying their hard drive, it would be very much in order to enlighten any Lucky99 customers who have some doubts about this.
The answer is that there isn’t anything in the U.S. federal laws that exists to make online sports betting, or any other form of online gambling, for that matter, illegal. Now, that doesn’t mean that you do it while waving a flag around. It’s just that the likelihood of being arrested for it is almost non-existent.
This is not to say that in certain states, there aren’t laws that might cover that kind of activity. Someone in North Dakota, for example, was once cited for it, and there have been one or two other examples. But by and large, the authorities – whether they are on the national or state level – are not after YOU. They would prefer to nail the people you are betting with. And they have a difficult time doing that, because offshore sportsbooks like Lucky99 are operating in jurisdictions where not only is what they do perfectly legal, but they are licensed and regulated in the process.
A false impression was created on the part of many careless observers when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) was passed in 2006. Contrary to what became too popular a belief, this law, which may or may not be constitutional and was a rider onto a much bigger bill, the Port Security Act, did not make it illegal for someone to place a bet with a business that was located offshore. What it DID do was prohibit financial institutions from being involved in transactions for the purpose of online gambling.
Essentially the term “financial institutions” covers the conventional ways that players had been using for making transactions, whether through deposits or withdrawals, including major credit cards and bank transfers. These involve banks, but there were also incidents where federal authorities shut down “e-wallet” services like Neteller (the most popular) and others from gambling-related business, and that was something that made it problematic for the casinos and sportsbooks to transact with customers in the United States. There has been a certain amount of circumvention – for instance, credit card transactions are assigned a “merchant code” that is normally associated with a whole different kind of business, so that they do not appear as gambling transactions.
At any rate, if you are looking to place a few dollars on some events with an online operator like Lucky99, you need not worry about the cops coming to call. And now there are some breakthroughs that have made it easier for people in the U.S. to enjoy their favorite activity without a lot of tracking. Perhaps the most prominent of these involves the use of Bitcoin, a virtual currency that is transferred from one party to another without any concern for where it originated geographically. In fact, since there are no financial institutions involved in the transactions (since it is strictly peer-to-peer), the argument has been advanced that the use of Bitcoin certainly falls outside of the scope of UIGEA, which is good news!
