Michigan's self-exclusion gap widens as illegal offshore market grows

Henry Williams did not bury the number. In a statement issued Thursday, the executive director of the Michigan Gaming Control Board noted that the share of online-casino players using only legal sites has fallen from 52% to 24% since 2022. That is not a rounding error. That is a market that has more than halved its compliance rate in three years.

The MGCB sent cease-and-desist letters to 33 offshore operators — Azartzona, BitofGold, Cryptoplay, Donbet, and 29 others — for offering casino-style games and sports betting to Michigan residents without a state license. The letters are enforcement notices, not injunctions. Offshore operators are not required to honor them, and most of the named sites operate well outside any jurisdiction Michigan can compel.

What Williams named, and what the letters cannot fix, is the self-exclusion problem. Michigan's licensed operators are required to check every account against the state's Internet Gaming and Sports Betting Responsible Gaming Database — a voluntary registry that lets individuals ban themselves from online gambling. The 33 offshore sites have no such obligation. A person who has formally asked the state for help stepping away from gambling can open an account, deposit money, and place bets on any of those sites. Michigan has no mechanism to prevent it and no way to recover the funds afterward.

Williams called self-exclusion "one of the hardest and most courageous decisions a person can make." The legal architecture built around that decision stops at the state line.

The American Gaming Association estimated, as of August 2025, that Americans wager $673.6 billion annually with illegal and unregulated operators — a figure that has grown 22% since the AGA's previous measurement in 2022. The MGCB's 33 letters sit inside that much larger number, which no single state's enforcement calendar is designed to address.

The consensus reading of this enforcement action is that it demonstrates regulatory seriousness. I think that misreads the structural position. The MGCB has built a licensed market with genuine consumer protections: tax compliance, responsible gambling obligations, self-exclusion enforcement. The offshore market's growth suggests those protections are functioning as a cost that licensed operators carry and unlicensed operators do not. When compliance is expensive and enforcement is limited to letters, the market does not correct — it bifurcates. The players who need protection most are the ones most exposed to the operators who offer none.

The legal standard that applies here is not Williams's enforcement authority, which is real but geographically constrained. It is the threshold question of whether federal law — specifically, the Wire Act and its application to internet gaming — gives Michigan any claim against offshore operators that accept bets from Michigan residents through servers located abroad. Whether the Department of Justice has a current position on that question is not on the public record in these sources. That gap is where the 33 letters land.