I am not a lawyer or politician so I cannot guarantee this advice is 100% correct but it is my understanding :

1. There are currently no laws against placing sports bets with overseas operators.

2. The NSW government had legislated to prohibit gambling on Australian Horse Racing with any overseas operator. I am not aware of what the penalty supposedly is (or how they would ever catch you) and to my knowledge no prosecutions have ever been attempted. As far as I know no other states have any similar law so this is only a problem if you are living in NSW. I notice the recent ads on Sky have specifically mentioned betting exchanges and have tried to imply that you may not get your money (ie. using scare tactics that you will lose money - obviously they have realised that nobody is paying much attention to an unenforceable law!).

3. The Interactive Gambling legislation (Federal legislation) prohibits gambling on "in play" events. The TABs were trying to use this as a weapon against Betfair so Betfair have been sending out emails to customers advising them that they are not to bet on "in play" events. Any Australian customers breaching this may have their accounts closed, etc. Again as far as I know this legislation applies to the gambling provider rather than the punter so worst case is your account will be closed and any winnings on those events may be forfeited.

So as far as I know you are in the clear if you are concentrating on sports betting provided you dont bet once the play has begun. Biggest problem may be getting money in and out of off-shore accounts as the banks seem to be making credit card transfers to bookmakers harder and harder. Not sure if this is being encouraged by the government or if the banks are just responding to problems with fraud/bad debts/etc. I suspect that in the next year you will see increasing number of bookmakers accepting e-cash type alternatives (eg. Paypal, etc) which should help get around this problem.

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