Wyoming Gaming Commission Cracks Down on Harassment of Athletes

Harassment of college athletes has been in the news recently, and Wyoming has decided to take punitive action. Any bettor found harassing a student-athlete will be placed on an involuntary exclusion list and banned from betting with any licensed sportsbook operating in the Cowboy State.

Zero Tolerance

The Wyoming Gaming Commission (WGC) recently voted to implement new rules punishing people who harass athletes over their performance. While the NCAA has vigorously advocated for a ban on college player props, Wyoming’s regulatory body has decided that focusing penalties on the bad actors is preferable to eliminating college player props that many bettors enjoy without any deleterious repercussions for the athletes themselves.

Player proposition bets deal exclusively with the performance of an individual athlete and not the team as a whole. Some of these props can take the form of a quarterback on a specific team to throw over or under a designated number of yards, touchdowns, interceptions, or any number of statistically driven markers. The same props can be created by oddsmakers on a basketball player to score a certain number of points, assists, rebounds, etc.

When bettors wager over the designated number on these student-athletes to reach these assigned goals but the athlete fails to reach those statistical benchmarks, those bettors lose, and they have been known to take their anger and frustration out on the athletes through social media.

Addressing Harassment

During a November 22, 2024, meeting, the WGC voted to approve these new rules and punish the harassers by banning them from wagering with any licensed operator in the state. Similar to the rules introduced in Ohio and West Virginia, it was seen as a rather unique way to deal with the problem, unlike other states that have banned college player props while ignoring the bad actors.

The WGC’s new rules specifically define what is considered harassment:

“Harass encompasses behaviors such as verbal, written, or electronic threats, lewd or obscene messages or images, acts of vandalism, or physical contact without consent. These actions must be targeted at an individual with the awareness—or reasonable assumption—that they would result in considerable emotional distress, fear for personal safety, or anxiety about potential property damage.”

Sports Betting Alliance Fears Ban

The Sports Betting Alliance, an industry mouthpiece whose members include FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM, and Fanatics, fears that banning college player props will drive domestic bettors to the offshore shops that routinely offer them on their betting menus.

Those thoughts were also echoed by Scott Sadin, chief operating officer of Integrity Compliance 360 (IC360), who said at a conference recently, “By banning those props, you’re pushing more activity and engagement to offshore, underground markets where that lacks visibility, that lacks collaboration, that lacks access to data.”

“Our system benefits from engagement from sportsbook operators giving us access to wagers, giving us access to odds,” Sadin said. “It benefits from working collaboratively with sports properties, talking about information and injuries and things of that nature. By banning them altogether, we’re going to lack the data access; we’re going to lack the transparency necessary in order to make sure we’re detecting [incidents] in as close to real-time as possible.”