Proposed legislation targets sports betting marketing tactics

Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) announced Tuesday he intends to introduce legislation that, if passed, would place severe limits on the way online sports betting companies in the United States market to and interact with their customers.

Saying the sports betting industry has been operating since 2018 in "a Wild West, largely unregulated environment," Tonko, who was joined by members of Northeastern University's Public Health Advocacy Institute, said, "We are dealing with a massive and growing public health crisis involving a known, addictive product."

Among other things, Tonko's SAFE Bet Act would:

• Ban sportsbook advertising during live sporting events.

• Ban language from sportsbook advertisements promoting "bonus" or "no sweat" bets.

• Prohibit sportsbooks from accepting credit cards from customers seeking to make deposits.

• Require sportsbooks to accept no more than five deposits from a single customer within a 24-hour period.

• Prohibit gambling operators from using artificial intelligence to track a player's gambling habits or to use AI to create customer-specific prop bets.

In February 2023, Tonko introduced the Betting on Our Futures Act, a bill focused more narrowly on advertising by sports betting operators. Modeled after the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned tobacco advertisements, that previous legislation sought to ban all online and electronic advertising of sports gambling.

On Tuesday, Tonko reiterated his stance that many sportsbook advertising tactics are "predatory" and intended "to hook and retain a new generation of consumers."

"Just as in the tobacco industry when it was determined that that industry was posing a public health situation, we have now displaced Joe Camel with celebrity spokespeople and, yes, free product," Tonko said.

In the nearly six years since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal statute that had restricted regulated sports betting to primarily Nevada, legal betting markets have launched in 37 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Since the ruling, American sportsbooks have taken more than $337 million in bets.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who also has introduced legislation targeting the sports betting industry, echoed some of Tonko's concerns this week on social media.

"I've written to the companies urging they cease exploiting their troves of real time data & algorithms to hook vulnerable users," Blumenthal wrote on X.

A spokesperson for the American Gaming Association, which serves as the lobbying arm of the gambling industry, declined to comment on Tonko's latest proposed legislation, citing a desire to see the details of the entire bill once it is formally introduced.