Wyoming Leads with New Sports Betting Harassment Laws

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00:00I don't know that we would typically start talking about the state of Wyoming, but here

00:07we are.

00:08And Wyoming has something interesting related to athlete harassment as a potential challenge

00:16to what is happening in their sportsbooks.

00:19Yeah, Mike, thanks for having me on, and happy Thanksgiving to you and your family as well.

00:24You're right, it is kind of funny to be talking about Wyoming on a news show.

00:29It's such a small state, and you really don't think about it ever with sports betting.

00:33They don't have many sports teams, frankly, I can't name one.

00:37But it's actually been pretty important as it goes with sports betting regulation and

00:43doing things that happen in Wyoming that another bigger state adopts.

00:48We saw this last year with states that took aim at Daily Fantasy sports operators that

00:53offered basically player prop parlays.

00:56Wyoming was really the first one to take action against them.

00:59And now we have the latest thing to come out of Wyoming, is they just passed the ability

01:04for sportsbooks, sports betting apps, to now ban anyone who is found guilty of harassing

01:10an athlete.

01:11Obviously very significant.

01:12We've talked about this issue in sports betting pretty much since the dawn of time from the

01:17days of Jack Molinas and the CCNY scandals and college basketball in the 1950s and 60s,

01:24all the way up to now where you see on social media athletes getting sent messages either

01:30threatening them or calling them out.

01:32We see it a lot with fantasy football.

01:33But really in college sports is kind of where this debate has coalesced.

01:37So now sports betting apps will be able to ban anyone who is deemed to have sent an explicit

01:43threat, a sort of suggestive threats, and a photo.

01:48They really have a lot of lateral leverage or a lot of authority here to ban anyone who's

01:55deemed to have kind of harassed an athlete based on betting.

02:00We've seen this pop up in the last year with the NCAA calling for states to ban player

02:06props on college athletes, ban betting on different colleges.

02:09A number of states already had those rules kind of baked into their law, but then we

02:13saw once the NCAA called for more and more pass lists.

02:17Frankly, I think this is really interesting because instead of, you know, not allowing

02:20people to bet things, thinking that that's going to help prevent harassment, you actually

02:25have sort of a proactive, direct approach here where if someone does something, they'll

02:29be banned and they can't bet on a legal sports book.

02:32So interesting to see sort of the first state move through on this.

02:37I'd be really interested to see if others follow in the coming years, if they're deemed

02:41to have had success with it here and especially the industry.

02:44If you're a fan to our DraftKings and you say, hey, maybe this has worked really well

02:47in Wyoming.

02:48You have those relationships with the other big states, the New Yorks of the world, Pennsylvania's

02:52and New Jersey's to say, hey, they had a great idea here, maybe it'll work here.

02:56So interested to see how this works out kind of in the first iteration and then where potentially

03:00next it could move to after that.

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