Sponsors (2)
The bill tightly expands enforcement, consumer safeguards, and monitoring to reduce fraud and gambling harms while creating substantial new compliance, privacy, and jurisdictional burdens that may limit market availability and raise costs for operators and consumers.
People at risk of gambling harm (young adults, low-income individuals, people with gambling problems and their families) gain stronger consumer safety measures — age and identity checks, self‑exclusion across states, withdrawal safeguards, limits on aggressive incentives, and required funding for treatment and education — reducing exposure to gambling-related harms.
State and federal authorities (DOJ, state AGs, regulators) get clearer enforcement tools and criminal/ civil penalties — injunction authority, per‑violation fines, coordinated federal‑state processes, and uniform AG rulemaking — increasing deterrence against illegal market operators and concentrating enforcement resources.
Regulators, law enforcement, and consumers benefit from improved market integrity and monitoring because operators must keep anonymized wager records, file suspicious‑transaction reports, and remove deceptive/illicit listings, making fraud, manipulation, and match‑fixing easier to detect.
Small operators, tech workers, and consumers face substantial new compliance and operating costs — licensing, background checks, audits, data collection/storage, reserve funds, and reporting — which could raise prices, reduce competition, or drive some firms out of the market.
A fragmented mix of state and Tribal rules plus federal approval requirements risks legal uncertainty and uneven availability across jurisdictions, increasing compliance complexity for platforms that operate nationwide and potentially leaving consumers with patchy access.
Mandatory collection and sharing of identity, IP/location, and transaction metadata and a centralized national self‑exclusion list create real privacy and data‑breach risks for users whose sensitive information could be re‑identified or exposed.
Based on analysis of 24 sections of legislative text.
Makes online prediction markets legal only when authorized under an Attorney General‑approved State wagering program and imposes strict consumer‑protection, verification, and enforcement rules.
Introduced March 11, 2026 by Richard Blumenthal · Last progress March 11, 2026
Establishes a federal regulatory framework that effectively bars most online prediction markets from operating unless they are explicitly authorized under a State wagering program that has been approved by the U.S. Attorney General. The law creates criminal and civil enforcement tools, a detailed set of consumer-protection rules (age, identity, and location verification; bans on certain bonuses and VIP programs; limits on proposition bets and amateur sports wagers), definitions and compliance requirements for operators, and a national self-exclusion registry maintained by HHS. Operators face strict prohibitions on insider trading, market manipulation, deceptive practices, and many common marketing and reward practices; States must create or designate a regulator and apply for federal approval of a wagering program (approvals last three years). The Attorney General and State attorneys general gain enforcement powers, including civil injunctions and criminal penalties (minimum fines and up to 2 years imprisonment), and HHS must run a national self-exclusion list for people who opt out of online prediction wagering in participating States.