Of every dollar bet online in the United States in 2024, about 74 cents went through illegal operators. That is the central finding of a new report from the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, produced with the market intelligence firm Yield Sec.
The numbers are large. The total US online gambling market was worth $90.1 billion in 2024, and $67.1 billion of it was illegal. The illegal sector grew 64% on the year. The legal sector grew 36%.
The report is the last in the campaign’s 2024 series and covers online sports betting, casino and poker state by state. It finds that states with more legal operators post the highest gross gambling revenue per capita as a share of income.
The reverse holds too. Oregon, Maine and Arkansas have legal online sports betting, but their markets sit below the 0.31% average for states with no legalization. They have one, two and three operators, an average of 2 against a national average of 9. Delaware, Rhode Island and Connecticut allow both sports betting and casino gaming, and they fall under the 0.77% average for states that permit sports betting alone. Their operator counts are four, two and three, an average of 3 against a national 14. The report sees a clear link between few legal operators and lower per-capita revenue.
That cuts against what legalization backers have argued: that more licensed operators mean more competition and a smaller illegal sector. The campaign says years of monitoring contradict this.
Derek Webb, founder and funder of the campaign, was blunt. “The onus is on the proponents of legalization to provide an explanation as to how they managed to get it so wrong,” he said. He added that they “should apologize to the legislators they influenced” and called for a moratorium on state expansion until action cuts illegal revenue.
Ismail Vali, founder and CEO of Yield Sec, said the hope behind legalization was simple. Licensed options in each state would channel players away from illegal sites. “This has not happened,” he said. Seven years after state legalization began in 2018, he described the market as “a fortress of crime.”
Vali argued illegal gambling is many problems, not one, and can be controlled only through process, which he summed up as Monitor, Police, Enforce, Optimize.
