BILL NUMBER: S7908B
SPONSOR: GOUNARDES
 
TITLE OF BILL:
An act to amend the racing, pari-mutuel wagering and breeding law, in
relation to preventing minors from participating in sports wagering
 
PURPOSE OR GENERAL IDEA OF BILL:
To prevent illegal underage gambling on mobile sports betting websites
and apps by requiring operators of such websites and apps to conduct
commercially reasonable age assurance for account holders and to allow
individuals such as a parent to register their personal data so that an
underage user cannot borrow it to create an account
 
SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:
Section one of this bill amends subdivision one of Section 1367 of
Racing, Pari-Mutuel Wagering and Breeding Law (PML) to add two new defi-
nitions for "identifying information" and "Internet protocol address."
Section two of this bill adds a new subparagraph (iii) to paragraph (I)
of subdivision 12 of Section 1367 of PML to require mobile sports
betting apps to block users who are attempting to create an account or
place a wager using information from an excluded list.
Section three adds a new paragraph (k) to subdivision 12 of Section 1367
of PML to require the NYS Gaming Commission to establish and maintain an
exclusion list for users such as parents who may wish to electronically
register personal identifying information such as their credit card,
name, last four digits of a Social Security number, or an IP address for
the purposes of preventing another user from using this information to
create a mobile sports betting account. The identifying information may
belong to the registrant themselves, or, if the registrant is a parent
or legal guardian of a minor who is under the legal sports betting age
of 21, it may belong to their minor.
The Gaming Commission shall promulgate regulations to ensure that the
identifying information is unique and reliably associated with the user
and to ensure that all data is securely protected with safeguards such
as encryption, firewalls, and password protection. The data must be
permanently deleted if the individual at any point decided to rescind
their spot on the exclusion list, and if the data belongs to a minor, it
must be removed from the list when the minor reaches the age of 21.
Section four of this bill amends subparagraph (iii) of paragraph (a) of
subdivision 4 of Section 1367-a of PML to require mobile sports wagering
operators to conduct commercially reasonable and technically feasible
age assurance for users on their platforms at the point of account
creation. The Commission would promulgate regulations outlining accepta-
ble methods of age assurance, though the bill precludes self-reporting
of age with no other corroborating evidence. Mobile sports wagering
operators would also be required to accept age signals from devices,
which could be included in the Gaming Commission's regulations as one
possible method of age assurance.
Section five of the bill is a severability clause.
Section six of the bill sets the effective date.
 
JUSTIFICATION:
New York first legalized mobile sports betting, wherein users can place
virtual wagers via a website or app on the outcome of a sporting event,
the individual performance of an athlete, or a combination thereof, in
the FY22 budget (Part Y of Section 4 of Ch. 59 of 2021). Mobile sports
betting operators, such as Bally Bet, Caesars Sportsbook, DraftKings,
ESPN Bet, FanDuel, and others, would be able to offer their product to
New Yorkers provided that they met a number of conditions: they must be
licensed by the New York State Gaming Commission, pay a one-time $25
million fee to the state as well as a 51% tax on their gaming revenue
moving forward, produce a detailed annual report for the Commission on
the total amount of wagers placed and prizes awarded, and submit to an
annual financial audit. Licensees were also required to take a number of
steps to ensure that sports bettors were limited to a single account,
and, crucially, that they were not on a list of "prohibited sports
bettors" which Racing, Pari-Mutuel Wagering and Breeding Law (PML)
1367(1)(r) defines as casino or gaming employees, related contractors
and consultants, their spouses, children, siblings, or parents residing
in their principal abode, participating athletes t hat are the subject
of the sports event, sports agents and owners, union umpire personnel,
employees of sports governing bodies overseeing the sporting event - or
any person under the age of 21.
Mobile sports betting operators were required under PAL
1367-a(4)(a)(iii) to prohibit under 21 minors from accessing their plat-
forms pursuant to Gaming Commission rules and regulations, which
currently stipulate that operators must collect full names, addresses,
phone numbers, self-reported dates of birth (DOBs), and the last four
digits of Social Security numbers, unless a user willingly provides a
full Social Security number, at the point of account creation. The
Gaming Commission then prescribes that operators use multi-factor
authentication (MFA), which may include a password, previously provided
security questions, biometric data such as a fingerprint or face or
voice recognition, or an authorization code sent to a user's device or
email, to verify a user's identity and ensure that the bettor is of a
legal age.
Despite the Gaming Commission's best intentions, however, minors are
easily able to access the last four digits of a parent's Social Security
number as well as their name, address, and phone number. Without a more
robust know your customer (KYC) requirement to ensure that the person
creating a mobile sports betting account is actually over the age of 21,
the current requirements do not meaningfully prevent prohibited minors
from accessing these incredibly high risk platforms.
The presence of underage minors on mobile sports betting platforms is
undeniable. Major sportsbook operators DraftKings and FanDuel openly
compete in the lucrative marketplace of college campuses, where a large
chunk of students are under 21. One NCAA survey found that 58% of 18- to
22-year-olds had placed a wager in the last year, with nearly 70% of
college students reporting betting at one point or another (Brooks,
Khristopher. "Underage Teenagers Are Illegally Placing Sports Wagers
Online, Survey Suggests - CBS News." Www.cbsnews.com, CBS News, 25 May
2023, www.cbsnews.com/news/online-sports-betting-teenagers-ncaa-
survey/.) Another survey from the National Council on Problem Gambling
found that between 60% and 80% of high schoolers reported sports betting
in the past year, and teachers and students alike report open conversa-
tions about the latest parlay and point spread bet in school hallways on
a daily basis (Cotrone, Colby. "High Stakes for High Schoolers: Wanna
Bet Teens Need Gambling Education?" New York Post, 7 May 2024,
nypost.com/2024/05/07/lifestyle/ hiqh-stakes-for-high-schoolers-wanna-
bet -teens-need-g ambling-education/.)
In an October 2023 report, State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli noted the
particular challenges that mobile sports betting presents for youth, who
are more engaged with their smartphones, more compulsive compared to
adults, and more likely to develop an addiction disorder that leads to
other problems later in life (DiNapoli, Thomas'. Recent Impact of Gaming
Expansions on Revenues and Problem Gambling in New York. New York State
Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, Oct. 2023.) Furthermore, outpatient
service providers treating problem gaming and addiction disorders report
a huge surge in underage patients since the legalization of mobile
sports betting, particularly of young male patients, and New York's
gambling "HOPEline" reported a 26% increase in calls in the state's
first year of mobile sports betting (Rock, Julia. "In Brief: Sports
Betting in New York." New York Focus, 2025, nysfo-
cus.com/2025/01/16/what-is-sports-betting-new-york.)
This bill presents a commonsense solution to this problem by requiring
sportsbook operators, only nine of whom are currently licensed to oper-
ate in NYS, to undergo commercially reasonable age assurance to deter-
mine whether or not a user is 21 years of age and thus able to legally
create an account on their platforms. Age assurance, which is already
the law of the land for social media apps with addictive feeds under
Article 45 of General Business Law, is widely deployed across apps and
websites in the 21st century. Mobile sports betting platforms, which
since January of 2022 have facilitated the creation of more than 5.6
million unique user accounts and processed more than 2.6 billion trans-
actions, are highly sophisticated technological products that more than
capable of securely collecting, and then deleting, information specific
to a user to determine whether or not they can legally use a platform. 1
This bill thus provides that the Gaming Commission must specify accepta-
ble methods of age assurance in their regulations for the gaming plat-
forms, provided that the methods are more reliable than user self-re-
porting of age.
Secondly, this bill requires the Gaming Commission to allow individuals
to electronically submit any identifying information, so long as it is
unique to the individual, to a virtual database that the Gaming Commis-
sion would maintain. This electronic database would have the benefit of
allowing parents to register their identifying info, such as a Social
Security number, phone number, credit card, or other piece of unique
data, to prevent their children from using such data to illegally create
an account. Parents would also be able to register an IP address belong-
ing to a specific device, such as a minor's smartphone or family desk-
top, to prevent it from being able to download and launch mobile sports
betting apps, though any excluded data belonging to a minor would be
lifted from the exclusion list once the minor reached legal sports
betting age.
While numerous sportsbook operators currently allow parents to disquali-
fy themselves and their children from online betting, this process
requires parents to exclude themselves from each app and platform one by
one, which can be prohibitively cumbersome. Under this bill, the parent
would only need to register their identifying information once, and the
Gaming Commission would then undertake the task of making sure all oper-
ators in the state have access to and are using the database.
In creating a centralized digital database that allows parents to easily
prevent their identifying info or that of their child's from being used
to create an account, while also requiring gaming apps to undertake
commercially reasonable age assurance, this bill presents a commonsense
and practical approach to the growing problem of underage sports betting
in New York State and its deeply disturbing consequences.
 
PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:
2025: S7908 - Referred to Racing, Gaming, and Wagering
 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:
None
 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect on the one hundred eightieth day after it
shall have become a law.
1 "Governor Hochul Announces Mobile Sports Wagering Generated $862
Million for New York State in Its Second Year of Operation Governor
Kathy Hochul." Www.governor.ny.gov, 12 Jan. 2024,
www.governor.ny.gov/news/ governor-hochul-announces- mobile-sports-wag-
ering-generated-862-million-ne w-york-state-its. Accessed 5BC.