Sharing may be caring, but some lawmakers and law enforcement officials in Iowa would prefer if sports bettors were a lot less compassionate.
To that end, an attempt to curb proxy wagering and the sharing of online sports betting accounts took another step forward in Iowa on Wednesday, as the state Senate's Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would outlaw both those things.
Senate Study Bill 1097 is now off to the full chamber, bringing it one step closer to becoming law.
Not in my regulated market, pal
S.S.B. 1097 is identical to House Study Bill 21 – which took its own small step forward in January – with both pieces of legislation proposed by the Iowa Department of Public Safety.
In short, the bills would define account sharing and proxy betting that is intended to conceal someone's identity as illegal gambling. Offenders would be subject to criminal penalties, including jail time and fines.
Iowa's sports wagering rules already prohibit account sharing and proxy betting, but the legislation proposing to criminalize that activity is intended “to protect the public from falling victim to deceptive practices,” the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a January memo.
Josie Wagler, the legislative liaison for the public safety department, told a subcommittee last month that the online sports betting industry has “grown tremendously” since wagering was legalized in the state in 2019. However, Wagler added that Iowa law has not kept pace.
“We've seen a prevalence in account sharing and proxy betting taking place, and a lot of those activities lead to money laundering, identity theft, underage gambling, fraud,” Wagler said. “So with this addition of proxy betting and account sharing to illegal gaming, we feel like we can get a little bit better handle on those two issues that we're seeing here in Iowa.”
Account sharing is defined in S.S.B. 1097 as “entering into or participating in an agreement between two or more persons to, either temporarily or permanently, share access to a person’s account with the purpose of concealing a person’s identity.”
Proxy betting, meanwhile, is defined as “any wagering or betting activity, including a request of another to engage in wagering or betting activity, involving two or more persons, where one person places a wager on behalf of another person with the intent to hide or conceal the bettor’s identity.”
The Iowa sports betting bills also aim to criminalize the act of "delivering anything of value to place as a wager in a pari-mutuel pool or other authorized system of wagering after receiving that thing of value, for a fee, outside of a gambling structure."
Not a wise policy being pursued in Iowa: criminalizing proxy betting
— Joe Brennan Jr (@joebrennanjr) January 16, 2025
If operators don't want it they can handle it in their T&Cs & ban people (most do)
But states have a compelling interest to get more betting liquidity into the regulated market https://t.co/GSyiSX7Mdf
The proposed legislation caused a bit of a stir in the world of #gamblingtwitter, where account sharing and proxy wagering are viewed as much more harmless.
Nevertheless, sportsbook operators such as DraftKings and FanDuel forbid wagering using someone else's account.
Furthermore, outside of Nevada, proxy wagering is frowned upon. In Massachusetts, for example, the state's sports betting law requires operators to take steps to "prohibit persons from placing wagers as agents or proxies for others."
