Pro Leagues Urge States To Enact Bans For Abusive Bettors

Five major North American professional sports leagues and their players associations jointly wrote to gaming regulators in 35 states and the District of Columbia on September 15, 2026, calling for unified action to ban sports bettors who threaten or harass athletes, coaches and officials via social media and in-person interactions. The coordinated appeal described the harassment as crossing an ethical and criminal line, with Ohio, West Virginia, Wyoming and Louisiana already maintaining blacklists that exclude abusive bettors from sportsbooks and mobile apps.

The athlete-protection detection module within Guardii's platform addresses precisely this threat vector by intercepting harassment and threat patterns in direct messages before they reach the target. As a Meta Business Partner backed by Startmate, Guardii blocks or flags hostile contact directed at athletes in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and other platforms, surfacing patterns of sustained targeting, escalation and coercion rather than requiring manual review of every message, and enabling rapid escalation to the appropriate authority when an emergency threshold is crossed.