Drea Knufken
Last year, gross legal gaming revenues in the US were about $33 billion. Nevada alone was responsible for more than $10 billion of that. If you add other global gambling centers, such as Macau (which brought in $1.7 billion this February alone), Monte Carlo, Estonia, other legal global casinos bring that amount up substantially.
Virtual venues also rake in returns. The American Gaming Association says that “Internet gambling revenue for offshore companies was estimated to be $5.9 billion in 2008 from players in the United States and $21.0 billion from players worldwide.”
Take away the taxes, and gambling becomes a sea of profit. In the US alone, illegal sports wagers are worth as much as $380 billion annually, according to one National Gambling Impact Study Commission estimate. (About 92% of those earnings go to organized crime groups.) How big is illegal gambling? Perhaps Roger Dunstan sums it up best in this government report: “We are ignorant about the full extent of it.” Suffice to say, it is very lucrative.
