Venmo Sports Betting
3/19/2022 admin
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If you checked your Venmo feed last Sunday between 6pm and midnight, you might have noticed that it was awash with Super Bowl-related transactions, from the semi-innocuous 'tom brady is bad bye!!!!!!!!!,” to the more, uh, sus 'Rigging the Super Bowl.” Venmo told The Outline Sunday in no uncertain terms that gambling on sports through Venmo is not only broadly illegal in most places in the US, but against the company's terms of service. According to research done by The Outline using the transaction data available through Venmo’s public API, on average 44 percent of Sunday night's transactions included messages with Super-Bowl-related terms and 14 percent directly referenced gambling.
All Venmo transactions require a message of some sort, and they’re generally pretty transparent. Inspired in part by Vicemo — the website that provides a comprehensive list of every public Venmo transaction accompanied by a vice-related message (like, a bunch of tree emojis, “drank,” “drugs,” or, of course, the ever popular “drugz”) — I sampled transactions for the messages listed in Venmo’s public API against a variety of Super Bowl keywords (“football,” “Super Bowl,” “fucktomb,” etc.) and gambling-related keywords (“squares,” “prop,” or “bet,” as in, “In hindsight, maybe betting the mortgage on the Patriots wasn’t the best idea”) keywords in order to get a rough estimate of the number of people who used Venmo for possibly illegal purposes last night.
Based on my research, there were about 139,500 Venmo transactions occurring per hour, which evens out to approximately 837,100 Venmo transactions over the course of the evening. Forty-four percent of these transactions were obviously related to the Super Bowl in some way, and at its peak in the minutes after the game ended, 14 percent of transactions explicitly referenced gambling (i.e. 'Refund for super bowl squares,” “illegal super bowl gambling”), with an 8 percent average overall.
I’m guessing (hoping?) that a sizable portion of Super Bowl Sunday betters were a little less conspicuous with their payments. Regardless, there was likely anywhere from 65,000 to 370,000 Super Bowl gambling-related transactions on Venmo Sunday night. This is all, mind you, illegal in most states and totally against Venmo’s Terms of Service.
Despite the fact that Venmo staffed its HQ specifically for this event, the app still experienced a considerable amount of lag directly after the big game. Lots of users took to Twitter to point the finger at gamblers, who they alleged had overwhelmed the app with Super Bowl-related payouts.
Most online casinos offer bonuses and sportsbook promos to players. If you play at a US online casino that accepts Venmo as a payment method, they will likely offer a sign-up online casino bonus codes. Super Bowl gambling on Venmo Sports betting is illegal almost everywhere in the US. In the moments after the game, approximately 55 percent of all Venmo transactions were Super-Bowl-related and 14. An advantage of sports betting with Venmo in the USA is the extra geolocation service. Strict laws govern each state when it comes to online gambling. The Venmo requirements aid most sports books that only allow American citizens to gamble. These requirements ensure any player using a sportsbook that takes Venmo. PayPal is a pioneer in providing internet-based payment services. The system really took off in 2002, when it was acquired by eBay, becoming the online payment method of choice for the majority of web-based shoppers. Nowadays, bettors from around the world use PayPal to fund their betting.
Why is Venmo so slow? Is it because everyone is using it to pay off lost bets?
— Caleb Kaslik (@calebkaz96) February 5, 2018Venmo Sports Betting Tips
My entire Venmo timeline is people losing money on the Super Bowl.
To use Venmo for sports betting at sites like Bovada, you can’t employ the service directly. That is, Bovada and other books cannot accept Venmo transfers as such. Instead, you must purchase Bovada Voucher codes (or other sportsbook voucher codes) from fellow sportsbook members using Venmo.
— Jack Falahee (@RestingPlatypus) February 5, 2018While the Super Bowl is Venmo’s biggest day of the year, it’s certainly not the only day its users appear to gamble: An analysis by Quartz in 2017 showed that up to a third of the transactions on the whole service appeared to be gambling-related on the morning of the first March Madness game. Venmo did not respond to a request for comment.
When the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots reached the halfway point of Super Bowl LI on Feb. 5, 2017, the Falcons were in possession of a 21–3 lead over New England.
Mark*, an Ithaca College student, was feeling confident. His homegrown sports book, which he started with a friend, had received an overwhelming number of bets on the Patriots, who were three-point favorites to win the NFL Championship. For Mark’s clients to win their bets, the Patriots had to win by more than three points, so while the Falcons were sporting an 18-point lead, Mark was up by 21 points. An Atlanta win would allow him and his partner to hold on to approximately $3,500 in bets.
Before becoming a bookie himself, Mark and his friends had a bookie who they would bet on sporting events with through a website, and one day, they realized one of their favorite hobbies could become their new source of income. A bookie takes bets and manages payouts for a sports book, an organization that creates betting odds. Mark estimates that he and his partner made between $8,000 and $10,000 during their first 10 months as bookies.
“We were like, ‘This guy is just robbing us blind and making all of this money off of nothing,” Mark said. “How can we do this?’’’
Mark and his friend decided they would start their own sports book. Clients would send them betting odds from sports-betting websites, along with the desired amount of money they wanted to gamble through Venmo, an app that lets people send money to one another electronically. If the client won a bet, one of the bookies would send the winnings back through Venmo. If the client lost, Mark and his partner would keep the money. A traditional sports book, such as the legal ones in Las Vegas, makes its own odds, which are specifically calculated to create the most even betting line possible.
“It got to the point where we were moving more money than Venmo would allow us to,” Mark said. “Venmo only allows you to send like $3,000 a week, and we were sending $3,000 every couple of days.”
With eight minutes and 31 seconds left in the third quarter, the Falcons scored the first points of the second half, extending their lead to 28–3. This is the last time Atlanta would score in this game; as the Patriots would score 31 unanswered points to win the game in overtime 34–28.
“Just from that one game, we lost $3,500,” Mark said. “Once we lost that, we could not physically pay out all of the people. We had to tell people that they were going to have to wait a few weeks for their payout.”
The $3,500 Mark had to pay his clients is just 0.00000074 percent of the $4.7 billion the American Gaming Association estimates was bet on Super Bowl LI. The AMA estimates that 97 percent of all bets made on the game were made illegally, as many people from across the United States have gained an interest in betting on sports despite being from states where it is illegal.
Nevada, Delaware, Montana and Oregon are the only states that have legalized sports betting, so residents of the remaining 46 states must turn to other methods to suffice their gambling desires. The ways to gamble illegally include underground local bookies, similar to Mark’s operation, or apps and websites that are run internationally, such as Bovada, Betway, bet365 and the website Mark bets through, which is not named due to its illegality, in countries where sports betting is legal.
Research from the University of Nevada–Las Vegas shows the revenue of Nevada sports books increased from $136.38 million in 2009 to $231.79 million in 2015. While there is no way to track data behind illegal sports betting in the U.S., illegal betting is likely growing in a similar manner, experts believe.
Michelle Minton, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the increase in illegal sports betting stems from its legal growth in popularity overseas.
“Everyone has access to the internet now, and that gives people access to betting in other countries,” Minton said. “As betting continues to grow, it gets more coverage from the media, so while it may not be legal, it’s still being talked about.”
The AGA estimates that $150 billion is illegally bet on sports annually, while some estimates reach as high as $400 billion.
Charlie*, an Ithaca College senior and client of Mark’s, said he enjoys betting because it adds another element to games he was already interested in and can create interest in games he would not care about.
“If you like watching football but there are no games on with teams you like, you can throw a few bucks on a game just to give yourself a reason,” Charlie said. “I’m always wary of the risk I’m taking, but I’ve definitely made more money than I’ve lost, and the site doesn’t allow you to bet more than $25 at once, so I don’t think I can lose too
much money.”
The future of sports betting is currently up in the air as a pending Supreme Court verdict could alter the laws in a number of ways. The case, Murphy vs. NCAA, is taking a look at New Jersey’s in-state prohibition on sports gambling, along with the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which prohibits sports betting in all but the four states where it is legal. If PASPA is determined to be constitutional, nothing changes. If it is deemed unconstitutional, states will be able to regulate legal sports betting at their own discretion.
Matt Netti ’18, host of “The Weekend Winners,” a podcast about sports betting, said the only risks he worries about when betting are financial, not legal.
“My biggest worry is losing too much money,” Netti said. “I know what I’m doing is illegal, but those punishments don’t really worry me.”
Minton said the increase in sports betting by younger people, college students specifically, is the product of younger people’s greater willingness to take chances.
“Younger people are less averse to risks than older people,” Minton said. “Betting is also something that happens socially, so if someone you know is betting, it might influence you.”
Netti said he thinks the rise in the popularity of betting stems from how accessible sports are in the digital age.
Venmo Sports Betting
“All of the games are at your fingertips now,” Netti said. “You have the lines on your phone, you can check the scores on your phone, and you can bet on a game you’re not even watching.”
Mark has continued to work for a betting website but is no longer a full-time bookie after his Venmo account was shut down.He said betting on sports gives meaning to otherwise meaningless sporting events.
Sportsbetting Ag Complaints
“The appeal of betting is that it turns sports games that you would not normally watch into games that you care about more than your life,” Mark said. “You could throw a $10 bet on a Bills-Browns game, two bad teams you have no interest in, and it turns that game into the Super Bowl. My friends and I put $10 on every underdog in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, and it made every game so much fun to watch.”
Sports Gambling Websites
*Names in this story have been changed to protect anonymity, as sports betting is illegal.