Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00All right, Bovada, it was the time for them to get out of Michigan.
00:06You'll have to kind of catch me up here on the timeline here, because I had heard a few
00:10weeks ago that the state of Michigan did not want Bovada to be operating in their state.
00:16You and I, I think, kid around about this.
00:18It's like, wait a second, they're already illegal.
00:20They're offshore.
00:22So what is the demand actually going to do?
00:24And it looks like Michigan, Matthew, has taken some preemptive steps here, kind of like you're
00:29not allowed to bet in states that's not legal.
00:32You can't even access Bovada at all now in the state of Michigan.
00:36So tell me how this went down.
00:38Well, Craig, that's how it started off.
00:41Thursday, we noticed that Bovada had added Michigan, as well as Colorado, to its list
00:46of banned states.
00:48And at first, it wasn't available in Michigan.
00:51And now it seems like it is again available in Michigan and Colorado.
00:56And look, we haven't heard from regulators.
00:59They haven't wanted to confirm if the website is still available.
01:02But various people I know that live in those states have checked.
01:07We've been checking it via VPN in different places.
01:10And it does seem like you can still go on and bet on Bovada in these states.
01:15So yeah, Colorado and Michigan, and we have Connecticut as well now.
01:19They have sent cease and desist letters recently to Bovada.
01:25And they added them to the list of banned states, but it's not acting that way.
01:30For example, Craig, I live in Delaware, Bovada is banned in Delaware, and it actually is
01:36banned in Delaware.
01:37It's not just on the list.
01:38When I go to open it up, it says, you can't access this.
01:42It doesn't even give me an option to create an account.
01:45It says if you have an account and you want to withdraw funds or something, you can log
01:48in here, but you can't actually do anything else.
01:52But that is just not happening in Michigan and Colorado yet.
01:55So Michigan said that they were going to continue to monitor the process to make sure Bovada
02:01was completely complying with the cease and desist.
02:06And we're just not sure when and if that is going to happen completely now at this point.
02:12One other issue that I noticed too, when Connecticut sent their cease and desist, they made it
02:17very clear that they want their customers to be able to get their money back.
02:21And Bovada is only allowing cryptocurrency withdrawal in states that have had operations
02:27closed down.
02:29So is that going to be okay with the Connecticut regulator?
02:33I don't know.
02:34I asked and haven't gotten an answer back on that either.
02:37And you can understand why there's a limited flow of information on the record here, Craig.
02:43It's a messy situation.
02:44It is hard because even though they have a physical address for this site, and obviously
02:50Bovada is known throughout the industry, it's still kind of a nebulous, you know, where
02:54are they sending that cease and desist?
02:56Is it getting to the people that need to have it?
03:00And so this is one of those stories where you want to see the regulated industry win.
03:07And it's interesting that Bovada was quick to act on other states and is not now.
03:13And we're just going to have to see how this shakes out.
03:16Because again, they can send the cease and desist as much as they want, but it's hard
03:21for a state to really shut down what a company is doing that's licensed in a foreign country
03:28somewhere else.