On a chilly Wednesday evening in Atlantic City, New Jersey, four bettors sat in a restaurant booth inside a casino on the boardwalk, their table full of fried food and fountain drinks. March Madness was tipping off, but that’s not why they were there. Their plan was to bet on a fixed NBA game.

One of the men pulled out his phone, smiled wryly, and, with his partners eating in the background, snapped a selfie, commemorating the day as if it were a typical guys’ trip to Atlantic City.

The picture of the four men — Ammar Awawdeh, Long Li Pham, Timothy McCormack and the smiling Mahmud Mollah — is included in a criminal complaint accusing them of conspiring with Jontay Porter, a fringe NBA player with a gambling debt, to manipulate his performance so everyone could profit. Porter and three of the men sitting at the table on March 20, 2024, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in what’s the first proven fix since legal sports betting began spreading around the U.S. seven years ago.

Betting, an extremely popular yet once illicit American pastime, has exploded out of the shadows and into the mainstream. The bookmaking business, formerly restricted to Nevada, offshore websites and backroom phone centers, has evolved into heavily marketed, high-tech corporations capable of taking tens of thousands of bets per minute during big games. FanDuel, the largest U.S. sportsbook by market share, said wagering on Super Bowl LIX peaked at nearly 70,000 bets per minute.

The frequency of sports betting commercials in 2024 decreased by approximately 8% from the previous year, while spending on advertising increased, according to iSpot, a company that measures the brand and business impact of TV and streaming advertising. Gambling companies spent $434.4 million on sportsbook commercials in 2024, in line with the advertising spent on asthma and COPD prescription drugs and ranking 29th among all industries on TV.

The marketing produced record volume. Bettors risked an estimated $150 billion and lost more than $13 billion with U.S. sportsbooks last year, the most since 2018 when legal betting began spreading across the nation, according to the American Gaming Association (AGA). That $13 billion figure is comparable to how much Americans spent on Cyber Monday last November.

New York, Illinois and New Jersey have emerged as the largest legal betting markets in the U.S., surpassing Nevada several years ago. New Jersey and Illinois each exceeded $1 billion in betting revenue for the first time in 2024, doubling Nevada’s win for the year. Overall, according to the AGA, the sports betting industry generated an estimated $2.5 billion in tax revenue in 2024, money that in New York, for example, was dedicated to public education, problem gambling treatment and youth sports.

Surveys show that the general public remains pro-betting, but there have been coinciding negative impacts on society. Athletes, at the professional and collegiate level, have been targeted with death threats from losing bettors, and gamblers battling addiction have received VIP treatment from bookmakers. Meanwhile, savvy sports bettors, who hunt edges to invest their bankrolls, aren’t allowed to bet more than a few bucks in some cases, a sportsbook tactic that has caught the attention of regulators in Massachusetts and politicians in Washington.

At best, issues such as athlete harassment, increases in gambling addiction and attempts to fix games are growing pains that will level off as the market matures. At worst, this is the new norm, something American sports fans will have to accept — when billions of dollars are at stake, bad decisions and corruption are inevitable.

“Clearly, sports gambling is not going anywhere,” says Matthew Litt, a New Jersey attorney whose clients include a growing number of problem gamblers. “Since it’s not going anywhere, I would try to figure out how we get this to a place where it’s legitimate entertainment for the people who are able to handle it and stay away from the people who can’t handle it.”

Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia have legal betting, with Missouri poised to come on board this year. Georgia and Texas are among the states considering the issue in 2025. Each jurisdiction must weigh the personal freedom to enjoy what is a recreational activity to most versus the societal costs, including addiction that can come along with gambling.

The crux of the sports betting debate came to the forefront in a January hearing in the Minnesota State Senate. During the hearing, Les Bernal, a longtime vocal opponent of the gambling industry, called efforts to legalize sports betting the “big con,” and academics presented studies linking increases in financial and relationship problems in states that have launched betting markets.

Litt, a witness at the hearing, described to the committee how his clients, who he said were experiencing gambling addiction, received VIP perks from sportsbooks at the same time. He represents the estranged spouse and the two children of a problem gambler, who lost nearly $1 million of the family’s savings while receiving “relentless incentives, bonuses and other gifts” from a sportsbook; he also represents a former financial manager for the Jacksonville Jaguars who stole $22 million from the team in part to cover his daily fantasy sports habit that included a VIP host and perks.

Litt told ESPN that these days he’s receiving calls and emails from potential clients with similar stories almost daily. The personal nature of the text messages from sportsbook VIP hosts to the gamblers creates a “quasi-friendship,” he said.

“I mean it’s just predator and prey,” Litt told ESPN. “I don’t know that there’s another way to put it.”

At one point during the hearing, which was focused on the potential negative impacts of legalizing betting, Minnesota State Sen. Nick Frentz interjected with a counterpoint.

“The simple fact is we’ve had testimony this morning ignoring the fact many Minnesotans want to do this,” Frentz said.

The popularity of betting remains strong. A survey of 1,034 voters, commissioned by the American Gaming Association ahead of the U.S. elections, found broad, bipartisan support for legalized sports betting, with 67% of respondents approving, and even levels of support from Republicans (71%) and Democrats (71%). “There’s certainly been some hiccups and bumps in the road,” Bill Miller, a longtime lobbyist in Washington and now president and CEO of the AGA, told ESPN. “It’s hard for me to think about anything that moved as quickly in the state legislators as sports betting.”

Miller acknowledges that the U.S. sports betting industry has made missteps, though, and should be held accountable.

“It’s really important to remember our industry will never be as successful if we’re predatory,” Miller said. “All you have to do is look at the U.K. or Australia, where the industry was deemed to be or seen as predatory, and the hammer came down on them. I think there are a lot of lessons that we, as a pretty new industry, can and have learned about how to set this up in a manner where we continue to hold the public’s trust via the license and the public’s acceptance. And so far so good.”

The United Kingdom has had a legal sports betting market for 65 years but hasn’t solved the issue of problem gamblers being incentivized by bookmakers and casinos to keep playing. According to a recent story in The Guardian, an online casino sent “1,389 emails offering free spins and bonuses” to a problem gambler, a tactic a recent court ruling in the U.K. aims to make illegal.

The U.K.’s legal sports betting market has undergone significant regulatory changes in recent years, including a whistle-to-whistle ban on betting advertising during games and affordability checks for bettors who lose £500 a month through gambling. (The threshold amount for affordability checks is scheduled to lower to £150 in February. Gambling opponents in Australia have proposed the elimination of “bonus bets or inducements.”

Critics believe similar regulations are needed in the U.S. and efforts to rein in the industry have begun on Capitol Hill. In September, lawmakers introduced the SAFE Bet Act, a bill aimed at reducing sports betting advertising and restricting the sector overall.

In December, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “America’s High-Stakes Bet on Legalized Sports Gambling.” During the hearing, committee members from both parties questioned the sports betting industry’s marketing practices, the sincerity of operators’ efforts to identify problem gamblers, and why bookmakers offer bonuses and perks to losing gamblers while “throttling back” winning bettors. NCAA president Charlie Baker encouraged the committee to prohibit prop betting on collegiate athletes, saying that he believes doing so will help reduce the amount of abuse student-athletes receive from bettors.

Miller of the AGA says the betting industry wasn’t equally represented during the hearing and notes that he hasn’t sensed any increased momentum for federal involvement.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the chairman of the committee, concluded the hearing by saying, “This is not the end of this discussion, but only the beginning.”

Joe Brennan, an executive for online sportsbook Prime Sports, began proposing legal betting as a way to reinvigorate New Jersey’s struggling casino and racing industries in 2008, a decade ahead of the Supreme Court’s game-changing ruling. What has taken shape isn’t what he envisioned.

The action is getting faster and more dynamic, with analysts expecting the U.S. market to shift away from pregame betting and more toward wagering throughout a contest. Fanatics and a handful of other sportsbooks have implemented a technology called “BetVision” by Genius Sports that allows customers to stream an NFL game broadcast and bet on it from the same screen. Bettors can even click on the players on the field to see the betting options involving that player.

“Sports betting kept maturing as a TV advertising industry in 2024, as brands continued to explore new show genres aside from sports to find potential bettors,” Tyler Bobin, senior brand analyst for iSpot, told ESPN. “It’s also interesting to see the evolution of key messages — while parlay positioning has grown and then steadied, we’re also seeing more regularity for bonus bet and risk-free language over time, too.”

Brennan remembers a conversation with two veterans of the European betting industry when he was in the early stages of lobbying for legal sports betting to expand in the U.S. He wishes he would’ve heeded their warning. “They told me that you’re going to have to watch this legalization,” Brennan recalled, “because you’re going to have these companies [from Europe], they’re going to push into this country, and their form of acquisition marketing is, they just go out and grab up customers and they squeeze them, and they’ll squeeze them dry, and then just move on to the next customer. It’s an insatiable acquisitions appetite.”

Now, Brennan believes the industry he advocated for has an image problem.

“Undoubtedly, yes, and it’s our fault,” Brennan says. “It’s really difficult to put the way that the industry has sold itself to the American public back in Pandora’s box. It was sold like it was McDonald’s or Burger King, Coke or Pepsi.

“You have this huge, slick marketing that makes it seem that sports betting is accessible and easy for everyone,” he says. “It’s like steroid-injected sports betting right now. It’s disastrous.”

Jontay Porter was only 24 when he stood in federal court in Brooklyn in July and became the first American professional athlete in a major sports league to publicly confess to manipulating his performance as part of a gambling scheme.

“In order to get out from under large gambling debts accumulated over time, I agreed with my co-conspirators to withdraw myself from certain professional basketball games on the basis of reported illness or injury so that my co-conspirators and I could bet on and profit from successful bets on my expected performance, including bets made on my unders,” he told Judge James R. Cho.

Porter, now 25, is scheduled to be sentenced May 20. He is facing a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, but prosecutors estimate a 3.5- to four-year term.

In the meantime, more betting scandals are under investigation, including the performance of a second NBA player and multiple college basketball games from the past two seasons. An MLB umpire was fired in February after an investigation revealed that he shared a sportsbook account with an associate who was betting on baseball. Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for superstar Shohei Ohtani, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for stealing approximately $17 million from Ohtani to pay gambling debts.

Athletes continue to receive rampant abuse from bettors on social media, and the gambling industry’s treatment of problem gamblers is under heavy scrutiny.

The hope is that society will adapt to the new sports betting landscape, any upticks in gambling addiction will level off, and bad actors will realize that attempts to manipulate games can result in the end of careers and prison. But the market still has room for growth, with the potential future additions of California and Texas, the two largest states in the country. Also, a new wave of aggressive companies — sports prediction markets and sweepstakes operators — are challenging the current bookmakers for control of what, once fully mature, is expected to be the largest betting market in the world.

“To think about, basically building a brand-new legal industry on top of an illegal industry that existed for decades is no small feat,” Miller said. “I think about how far we’ve come.”