I Had No Idea

Maybe I'm merely ignorant and everyone else in the U.S. knew this, but if I hadn't watched 60 Minutes tonight, I would have gone on believing that internet gambling was legal in the United States. It is not: "The federal government is clear: gambling on the Internet is against the law. And yet millions of Americans do it on hundreds of Web sites, to the tune of billions of dollars."

The 60 Minutes segment explained why television advertisements for gambling websites like PokerStars and PartyPoker say that their sites are "not gambling sites" when they obviously are:

Those offshore companies are so brazen, they advertise. There are banners pulled by airplanes, ads in magazines, and commercials all over cable TV. How can a cable network air an ad for an illegal activity? It’s all in the fine print.

One ad was not for paradisepoker.com, where you can gamble, but for paradisepoker.net, which they call an “educational” site.

“You can play for free on those sites and learn about how to play poker,” says Lipscomb.

The .net site can advertise because there is no money involved, so it is not considered gambling. But with their identical logos and brand names, the obvious goal is to draw people from the free.net site over to the real gambling.com site.

Although I've avoided internet gambling mostly because I don't trust it, I assumed it was legal in this country because it is so prevalent and is done so openly.

Also, there are a lot of folks who have made tons of money off of internet gambling. The poker shows you see on TV repeatedly refer to certain players as very successful internet poker players. Are these people paying taxes on their winnings? I assume they are and that the government doesn't really care that this money is being won illegally, but I still find the whole thing fascinating.