August 31, 2024 12:45 pm
• Last Updated: August 31, 2024 12:45 pm
Bookmakers operating overseas and in largely-illegal corners of the internet have been watching the U.S. presidential election closely, giving Vice President Kamala Harris slightly-favored odds to win in November over former President Donald Trump.
For bettors in Connecticut, attempting to cash in on the election speculation could have its pitfalls.
Despite allowing patrons to wager vast sums on the outcome of elections, platforms such as Bovada and BetOnline operate largely outside the purview of state gaming regulators, who warn that consumers risk being taken advantage of or scammed out of their winnings.
Connecticut legalized online gambling and sports betting in 2021, launching a new market that includes online casinos, sportsbooks and lottery games.
That legal market, however, is limited to licensed platforms such as DraftKings, FanDuel and Fanatics which are regulated by the Department of Consumer Protection’s Gaming Division. As such, they are forbidden by state law from taking bets on nonsporting events — including everything from the outcome of the presidential race to Oscar winners or the color of the Gatorade used in the Super Bowl.
Despite those limitations, DCP spokeswoman Kaitlyn Krasselt said that state regulators are regularly confronted with overseas and offshore betting platforms taking wagers that fall outside the scope of Connecticut’s legal betting market.
Unlike licensed operators, those operating offshore also fail to distribute a percentage of winnings back into state coffers.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of problems with that: one, they’re illegally operating here,” Krasselt said. “Two, because they’re operating illegally they don’t care about the self-exclusion list, so they’re also sending these materials to people who may have voluntarily excluded themselves from Connecticut’s legal gaming platforms.”
In addition, Krasselt said that while DCP can investigate complaints about licensed gaming operators canceling bets or failing to pay out winnings, officials have limited ability to go after companies that operate outside of its jurisdiction.
Earlier this year, Connecticut issued a cease-and-desist letter to Bovada — an online casino that offers wagers on not only the outcome of the November election, but the color of Harris’ debate outfit and the severity of Trump’s criminal sentence — after determining that company was operating in violation of the state’s gambling laws. Similar actions were also taken against Bovada by gaming regulators in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and several other states, according to the website Legal Sports Report.
Krasselt said that the platform complied with the letter, and attempts to register for an account with a Connecticut zip code prompts a warning that the site is not available.
Bovada’s parent company, Hove Media, which is based in the island archipelago country of Comoros off the coast of East Africa, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Like their legal counterparts, Krasselt said that offshore and overseas platforms tend to send out a wave of promotional materials around the start of football season in late summer, Krasselt said. This year, that timing happens to coincide with growing interest in the U.S. presidential race.
Despite state and federal laws against the practice, one form of wagering on elections has operated with legal cover for more than three decades in the United States.
Beginning in 1993, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission began allowing researchers at the University of Iowa to operate a limited contract marketplace where people can buy and sell “shares” corresponding to the outcome of elections and other future events, with the prices fluctuating overtime like stocks. In 2014, similar permission was granted to PredictIt, an online prediction market operated by the University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Both markets operate as nonprofits with the stated mission to gather data for research purposes, while also limiting “investments” to several hundred dollars a person.
The CFTC attempted to rescind its letter granting PredictIt permission to operate in 2022, alleging that the site had failed to remain within its previously-agreed limits. However, the site has continued to operate after the agency’s move was blocked by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of appeals.
“The University’s goal in relation to the PredictIt platform has been purely to support its development as a research and educational tool for the international research community of which we are a part,” the site said last year in an open letter to its users. The man who helped bring PredictIt to the U.S., John Aristotle Phillips, grew up in North Haven and twice ran for Congress in Connecticut’s 4th Congressional District.
As of Tuesday, PredictIt offered patrons the ability to put money down on outcomes such as the size of Electoral College margin, senate races in Arizona and Ohio, and whether or not President Joe Biden will resign before the end of his first term.
The most active market, for the winner of the presidential race, has had 35.6 million trades placed.
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Publish date : 2024-08-31 05:49:00
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