Is purchasing contracts on tradesports.com legal for US residents? 
Tradesports.com is a futures exchange website that is hosted in
Ireland.  

I am wondering about both the laws (if any) pertaining to
the use of the website for wagering as well as the enforcability of any such laws.

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Clarification of Question by curious_-ga on 12 Jul 2004 04:58 PDT

To clarify, I am wondering about online gambling in general. 
Specifically, are there any laws or regulations that specifically
prohibit gambling activity over the internet even if the servers and
company running the operation is located offshore.  I seem to recall
having heard that the US govnernment regulates this in the same way as
"wire fraud", which is to claim that if any information goes over
wires that are regulated by the federal government (such as phone
lines) then the communication (if it is used for gambling) is illegal.

I don't know whether this is true or not, however.

Also, there is the issue of the nature of the tradesports contracts as
opposed to traditional bookmaking.  Tradesports uses a futures
contract approach where individuals offer to buy and sell "contracts"
at market-set prices, which will be worth 100% of their value if a
particular even takes place, and 0% of it does not take place.

So, has anyone in the US ever been fined, slapped on the wrist,
jailed, or otherwise punished for using a website located offshore to
make a wager?

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Clarification of Question by curious_-ga on 13 Jul 2004 10:38 PDT

In a nutshell, should a US resident feel comfortable using TradeSports
to make small wagers (less than $500)?

I sent them an email asking the question, they didn't give a yes or no
response "due to the ever changing nature of national and
regional laws in every country from which the Exchange can be
accessed", so I guess it depends where you live. Would you like the
email I sent them and their response posted as the answer?

Why don't you post it as a comment and if I feel that it answers the
question I'll happily award you the cash.  If it's completely vague,
though, then I suppose it wouldn't be quite as useful to me and I may
want to investigate further by leaving the question up and perhaps
increasing the dollar amount a bit.

Thank you for contacting the Exchange Operations team.

It is our policy, partly due to the ever changing nature of national and
regional laws in every country from which the Exchange can be accessed to
not offer individual legal opinions to applicant members. However,
Tradesports is an Irish registered and domiciled company legally providing
exchange services from Ireland under Irish and European Union Legislation
where all exchange member related information is completely confidential and
protected under Irish law.

As such when you trade on the TradeSports (OR Intrade as appropriate)
exchange you are utilizing the services of an Irish company, located in
Ireland, where those services are legally and confidentially provided to
you.

We trust this will be to your satisfaction

Please let us know if we may be of further assistance.

Kind regards,
Orlagh
Exchange Operations
Trade Exchange Network Group


The Trade Exchange Network never requests your password by email. For your
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If you receive correspondence asking you to email your password and / or
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 or +353 1 6200 364

-----Original Message-----
From:[email excluded]
Sent: 10 July 2004 02:07
To: help@tradesports.com
Subject: legality of tradesports in USA


Dear tradesports,
I wanted to know if use of your site is legal in the United States
Thank You,
(nameexcluded)

curious_-ga,

Unfortunately, if you want to pay loganmr-ga for this comment, you
will have to find a way to do it outside this site.  Google Answers
only allows authorized researchers to post answers for pay.  You can
tell researchers from other users by their user names appearing as
links.

I did some research on this question myself, including direct contact
with TradeSports through their live help function, where I got the
same answer as loganmr, though not at as great length.  I didn't have
time to prepare a professional-quality answer, but it appears that the
legality of US residents betting on TradeSports is uncertain, but
dubious.  Journalists avoided taking a position on the question, and
legal authorities they quoted generally doubted that it would be
legal.  Of course, TradeSports has a theory that says it is legal.  I
didn't see any indication that anyone had been prosecuted or that a
court had ruled on the legality of this activity, but my search was
limited.

If you are satisfied with the information in the comments, you can
close this question.  Otherwise, if you leave it open, with or without
increasing the price, some researcher may eventually post an answer. 
If you would like a more detailed, definitive answer than what appears
in the comments, it would help if you posted a comment or
clarification saying so, as researchers avoid posting answers to
questions that seem to be answered in the comments.

--efn
Google Answers Researcher

FYI, an interesting article on the topic that weighs the different
arguments for legality and illegality:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3073159

Best regards,

---Ell