US Sports Betting

Until very recently, most of the biggest online bookies concentrated their efforts solely on Europe, simply because punting is way more popular in that part of the world. However, that’s looking to change soon.  If market studies are to be believed, online sports betting in the States will soon be catching up to Europe in terms of numbers.

Is online betting legal in the USA?

This is the first thing that will come to your mind, and rightly so. We recommend that any punting you do is only with legitimate, respected crypto bookmakers. You need to stay safe, and that’s the only sure way to be sure.

Now, the issue of legality and gambling comes up quite often in the USA. However, the country does not exactly have a long history with sports betting. Usually, when Americans think gambling, they think casinos and card games.

As such, not a lot of states allow any kind of sports betting, let alone the online variety. As of 2020, the states which have legalized sports betting are:

• Delaware
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Mississipi
• Montana
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• West Virginia.

However, online usa gambling of any kind is highly restricted throughout most of the country. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) did not specifically prohibit online gambling – in instead targets any sort of financial transaction involving online gambling. As such, a lot of the top online bookmakers do not offer their services in the States. 

There are loopholes with this regulation, and the UIGEA is a highly criticized regulation. However, there are certain states whose residents can legally bet using the internet. These are:

• Delaware
• Iowa
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• Pennsylvania

US Bookmakers Online

Because of the above mentioned legal issues, finding a reliable bookie can be difficult for US citizens. First of all, brands which are recognized as go-to industry leaders avoid doing business there. Not only are they able to offer their services to a very small part of the population, but they also have to jump through a lot of hoops and be subject to stringent taxation.

As such, a lot of bookmaker ratings you would find online will not be very helpful. Instead, you have to look for betting sites which specifically target the US. These often have inferior quality services when compared to their EU counterparts.

Furthermore, because of how the UIGEA works, there’s a lot of sites out there who’ve figured out ways of going around this using alternate payment methods. These are not necessarily shady or scams, but you need to be doubly careful with such offers. They operate in a legal grey area. The problem is not that you will be fined or legally sanctioned when using them – but if any issues do happen to come up, you will not have customer protection safety nets to help you out.