Maryland’s education fund will receive a funding boost due to the opening of the regulated online sports betting market. This is according to GeoComply, a data-driven company that specializes in geolocation and fraud detection.
GeoComply recorded 16.5 million geolocation transactions over the course of Thanksgiving Weekend in the Free State. GeoComply SVP Compliance Lindsay Slader commented: “A strong start for the regulated market delivers on the promise of new revenues and consumer protections.
“Marylanders will continue to ditch illegal offshore sportsbooks for the security of legal, regulated operators that provide player safeguards and tax dollars for the state, just as lawmakers intended.”
Laws ditching offshore sportsbooks were passed in 2021, with policymakers citing mobile sports betting as an important component of revenue for the Blueprint for Maryland's Future Fund. Recently, Governor Larry Hogan publicly urged for an accelerated launch of mobile betting to fund state education through taxation, and protect consumers from fraud.
Maryland launched earlier this month, and betting surged throughout Thanksgiving weekend. There were multiple large-scale sporting events, with local NFL teams in action, exciting NCAA matchups, a full round of NBA and college basketball, plus the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
GeoComply compiled data from betting action from November 23-27, which came up with several interesting findings. It showed that seven sportsbooks were operating, 477,265 unique accounts were online, and there were 16.5 million transactions – 3.7 million of which occurred on Thanksgiving Day.
To get a sense of scale, Maryland's Thanksgiving geolocation traffic was almost double that of its neighbor, Virginia, and four times as large as the similarly sized Colorado.
