Colorado’s ban takes effect Aug. 12 and Ohio is drafting one, steering card users to offshore books and cash-advance fees.
- Regulated U.S. sportsbooks are dropping credit-card deposits as states ban them, pushing card users toward offshore books.
- Colorado’s ban on credit-card deposits takes effect Aug. 12, and Ohio is finalizing a similar rule for a late-summer vote.
- Card networks code sports bets under gambling category 7995, which many issuers decline outright or treat as a cash advance.
- Issuers charge the greater of $10 or 5% plus immediate interest near 30% on gambling cash advances, the CFPB found.
WASHINGTON — A credit-card deposit at a U.S. sportsbook increasingly fails, and the cause is the system, not the bank. Regulated operators are dropping cards as a growing list of states bar them, while the offshore books that still take a card run the charge through a gambling merchant code that many issuers decline or bill as a cash advance.
The regulated lane is closing
The clearest reason a card deposit gets rejected at a licensed U.S. sportsbook is that the book no longer offers it. DraftKings was first to pull the option, back in August 2025. FanDuel cut cards March 2, 2026, and BetMGM wound them down over the course of March. Bet365 ended card deposits April 13, and Caesars became the last of the major books to drop them in early May, trade coverage of the operator exits shows.
State regulators are codifying what operators started. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 26-131, which bars sportsbooks from accepting credit-card deposits, caps bettors at six deposits in a gaming day, and prohibits push notifications that encourage wagering. The measure takes effect Aug. 12, 2026, making Colorado the 10th state to bar card funding, according to the bill’s coverage.
Ohio is close behind. The Ohio Casino Control Commission is finalizing an amendment to its sports gaming rules that would strike credit cards from the list of approved deposit methods, a spokesperson said July 3. The change still needs clearance from the state’s Common Sense Initiative and the Joint Committee on Agency Rule Review before it can take effect, the commission told Ohio public radio. If those reviews raise no objection, the rule could take effect by late summer, trade coverage of the rulemaking reported. The enforcement risk is real for books that get it wrong: the Massachusetts Gaming Commission fined DraftKings $450,000 in 2025 for accepting credit-card deposits after that state’s rules disallowed them, regulators announced.
Why the network declines it
Even where a card is offered, the transaction carries a flag. Card networks classify betting and casino gambling under merchant category code 7995, a designation Visa and Mastercard treat as high-risk and route through dedicated gambling merchant accounts, Visa’s merchant data standards manual shows. Many issuing banks apply a blanket decline to that code.
Issuer policy, not the sportsbook, decides the rest. Chase, Discover and American Express explicitly classify online gambling as a cash advance; Citi and Capital One list legal wagers as cash advances without naming gambling; and Bank of America and Wells Fargo treat bets as cash equivalents that they “may” decline as internet gambling, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported. Whether a given card clears comes down to which of those buckets the issuer uses. The site’s deposit methods page tracks which options each book still supports.
The charge that follows when it clears
A card that does go through rarely posts as an ordinary purchase. Issuers that allow gambling largely treat the deposits as cash advances, the CFPB found, meaning a fee of the greater of $10 or 5% and interest that accrues immediately at rates near 30% with no grace period. A $20 bet draws the same $10 minimum fee as a $200 one. Across major issuers, gambling and other cash advances generated $717 million in fees on $3.6 billion in volume in 2022, roughly $1 for every $19 advanced. That mechanism, and a federal probe into it, was the subject of the cash-advance trap in credit card betting.
Where cards still go through
The books still taking cards are almost entirely offshore. Bovada and BetOnline continue to accept Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover deposits because they operate under international licenses and are not bound by state deposit rules, and BetOnline sets a $25 minimum and $2,500 maximum on card deposits. The trade-off does not disappear: the charge still moves under the same gambling code, so a card that funds an offshore account can still land as a declined transaction or a cash advance on the statement. For a card user, credit card sportsbooks increasingly means one of a shrinking set of offshore options rather than a licensed U.S. operator.