00:00now let's get to online casinos another sort of shutdown here it looks like the us is just
00:06kind of cracking down here making sure that the illegal ones are booted
00:11yeah it's not just online casinos it's those offshore sports books we just talked about
00:16right those all those websites that are very accessible and oftentimes cited by legitimate
00:21news sources they'll put out odds on crazy things to happen and they'll get picked up and
00:27the bovadas of the world the bet us's all these sites are very much out there and it's been on
00:32the states for the most part to crack down you know once the argument for legalizing sports betting is
00:38it's going to get rid of the offshore market but we've seen actually the only the offshore market
00:42has really gotten a lot bigger as you know sports betting has become legalized it's become more
00:46accessible and so far the department of justice the federal government hasn't really done anything
00:52against these offshore sports books so this week 50 state attorney generals came together
00:58all authored a letter calling on the department of justice to really take action and pursue criminal
01:03and civil penalties and prosecute to the full extent of the law these offshore sports books which
01:09oftentimes are websites that are based in you know costa rica other countries offshore they don't
01:14provide tax revenue to the states they certainly don't play by the same rules so if prop bets are banned
01:19in ohio they definitely would not be banned on one of these websites you could still access in ohio and
01:24the american gaming industry estimated that over 400 billion dollars is illegally wagered online on
01:31these sports books on these online casinos as well that's about five billion dollars of tax revenue that
01:36states don't get so we're seeing really the first coordinated effort you know sports betting is
01:41very much adjudicated and regulated on the state level but they need the federal
01:45power to prosecute and go after all these we've seen a bunch of you know attorney generals send cease and
01:50assist letters those have worked in some cases but really they want uh the doj to turn their attention
01:55here and that includes you know seizing assets and the domains of these websites so people can't access
02:00them and then also work with the financial institutions that sort of finance these places to block their
02:06access to capital as well so notably there was a couple states that didn't sign on the letter which
02:11i'm not quite sure why it was kentucky montana and texas as well as wisconsin you know kentucky is the
02:16only one of those states that has sports betting maybe the other states don't care as much and the
02:21letter was also authored by connecticut massachusetts nebraska and utah they really took the charge on this
02:27so we'll see if the federal government cares at all but it's definitely pretty big news that all these
02:34attorney generals got together because that's pretty hard to do
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