Wyoming regulators voted on Friday to effectively ban any bettors who are found guilty of harassing athletes or other sporting figures.
At a meeting on Nov. 22, the Wyoming Gaming Commission unanimously approved a change to its regulations to clearly define harassment of athletes as:
“to engage in conduct, including but not limited to verbal threats, written threats, electronic threats, lewd or obscene statements or images, vandalism or nonconsensual physical contact, directed at a person the [offender] knew or should have known would cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress, substantial fear for their safety or the safety of another person or substantial fear for the destruction of their property.”
Commissioners also unanimously approved a measure to add individuals who are found guilty of such harassment to the state’s involuntary exclusion list, in essence prohibiting them from betting on licensed and regulated sportsbooks.
Commissioners noted that the NCAA had been given an opportunity to review the proposal and approved of the measure, as did the University of Wyoming and sports betting operators.
Wyoming one of few states to take hardline stance on harassment
The decision comes as the interaction between bettors and athletes, both college-level and professional, continues to be scrutinized. Back in a July meeting, Wyoming commissioners had acknowledged the NCAA’s call for state-level regulatory action to protect players. Wyoming is a state with no professional sports teams but one Division I college athletic program, the University of Wyoming.
NCAA President Charlie Baker has called for a ban on college player prop bets, which are now prohibited in 13 states after regulators in markets including Ohio, Maryland, Vermont and Louisana took up his call-to-arms this year. Just this month, New Jersey lawmakers advanced a piece of legislation that would prohibit licensed operators in the state from offering or accepting wagers on college player props.
Meanwhile, Ohio and West Virginia are two of the only states to have imposed regulations specifically designed to penalize people who harass athletes.
An extensive study published in October by the NCAA and its partner, data firm Signify, found more than 5,000 public social media posts (not accounting for private messages) that had sent abuse directly to college athletes, coaches or officials over the space of a few months. Around one in eight of those messages were directly tied to sports betting based on the language used, but the report’s authors found that much of the abuse in other categories “was influenced by sports-betting behaviors.”
