Follow-up: These Mainstream US Newspapers Are Promoting Offshore Online Casinos
Here’s a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about gambling sites pretending to care about regulated gambling so they can send bettors to offshore sites.
This category differs, so I didn’t want to lump them with gambling sites. Bottom line: Various legitimate news sources also use their authority to send leads offshore. Bonus.com took on this issue in depth this summer, but I wanted to call out the publications that are doing it directly.
Again, I would ask lawmakers, policymakers and regulators in these states to pressure media outlets to stop this practice.
Yes, these are “sponsored posts.” but allowing advertising from companies that are clearly operating illegally in the US or in a given state shouldn’t be happening, at least from an ethical standpoint.
Albany Times-Union: New York has legal sports betting and has kicked around the idea of legalizing online casinos. But the latter is not legal in New York. Yet, here we have the newspaper in the capital of NY telling you to bet at ten offshore casinos.
Why should you care? This is the number one search result for a lot of terms around online gambling, including "best us online casinos”:
SFGate: A version of the above sponsored post also appears at a San Francisco publication that is a monster in Google. You will be shocked to learn that neither online casino or sports betting is legal in California, but we still end up with a list of offshore sites:
Dallas Morning News. Different site, same script, from one of the biggest publications in Texas. Again, no form of online betting is legal in Texas.
The Denver Post is also running a variation on the same post here.
I could find many more examples; we also still have the Penn State college paper telling people to bet offshore, for example. But the above are the most egregious examples from media sites that are supposed to be trusted sources of information in their cities and states. Having come from the newspaper industry, I am embarrassed for all of them.
All of this also highlights that while lawmakers wring their hands over the possible expansion of legal online casinos, Americans have no shortage of options to bet offshore.
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