West Virginia Legislates to Protect Athletes from Online Threats
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:03 - Next one we're gonna talk about here in West Virginia.
00:05 I'm not even clear what they're trying to accomplish here.
00:08 Is West Virginia trying to protect bettors
00:11 from themselves here?
00:13 Are they trying to regulate the kind of people
00:15 that are betting on sports?
00:16 I don't even get this, Pat, tell us more.
00:18 - So yeah, the legislator in West Virginia
00:22 has passed a bill that allows the regulators
00:26 to ban individuals from betting.
00:29 And it's largely to protect athletes.
00:31 There's a few cases we've seen across the country
00:33 where people will harass athletes online
00:37 or even in person about their performance.
00:40 And maybe it's derived from,
00:42 maybe they had somebody going for the over on points
00:46 and he hit the under and, well, boy,
00:48 I'm not happy about it.
00:49 So I'm gonna send some mean DMs to this guy
00:53 and mean meaning threatening.
00:54 I mean, we've seen cases where we've seen kidnapping threats
00:58 and murder threats and the like.
01:00 And this is something we're seeing more and more in states
01:02 is we've seen it in the props getting kind of banned
01:07 as a way to around this.
01:08 And the ban here is if they are charged
01:11 or if the regulatory agency finds them threatening
01:15 or however they deem not acceptable.
01:19 And yeah, it's to protect athletes.
01:21 And the question is, again,
01:24 if this was not a regulated market, would this happen?
01:27 Well, I think athletes have always gotten
01:29 threatening messages, I would assume.
01:32 I mean, just look, you go to any sort of game
01:34 and I mean, is alcohol a huge problem?
01:36 So that's something you have to look at too.
01:37 But if we didn't have regulated sports betting,
01:40 this sort of discussion wouldn't even be taking place.
01:43 So I think that's a good thing
01:45 because I think that was an issue no matter what anyway.
01:48 But I don't necessarily think sports betting
01:50 is the biggest issue in that.
01:51 I think people partying at games is a lot.
01:54 So I don't know, it's an interesting thing to watch
01:58 as we get into kind of regulators and legislators saying,
02:02 how do we make this a better, safer industry
02:04 for both the bettors and athletes and leagues and all that?
02:07 And this is gonna continue to evolve
02:10 over the next couple of years
02:11 and see different bills like this
02:13 to help make sure the industry is as good as it can be.
02:16 (upbeat music)
02:19 [MUSIC]