Connecticut’s Department of Consumer Protection issued nine cease-and-desist orders in the week of 7 September to prediction-market platforms it says are offering unlicensed sports wagering to state residents, and served roughly thirty subpoenas to trace who was supplying them. The recipients of those subpoenas are the part of the action worth reading closely: payment processors, identity-verification vendors, sports-data firms, app stores, and fifteen media organisations.
The orders name Polymarket, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Robinhood, ProphetX, Novig, Webull, Gemini and Underdog Predict. Each is directed to stop advertising, offering, promoting or otherwise making available “sports event contracts” or any other form of unlicensed online gambling to Connecticut residents, and to let residents withdraw funds currently held on the platforms. Non-compliance, the state says, may bring civil penalties under the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act or criminal penalties under the state’s gaming statutes.
What the state says is illegal about it
Prediction markets offering sports wagers are operating in violation of Connecticut gaming and unfair trade practices law, according to the department. The specific allegations are the interesting part: the platforms are “known to offer and accept wagers from prohibited bettors, including people under the legal betting age of 21 and who appear on the state’s voluntary self-exclusion list.” They also offer wagers on Connecticut collegiate sports, which state law prohibits expressly to protect college athletes from influence and harassment.
Both are claims about who the product reaches rather than about odds or margin. A self-exclusion list is a consumer protection that only functions if the operator is required to check it; the college-sports carve-out in Connecticut law exists because athletes are identifiable, contactable targets of a losing bettor’s anger.
Gov. Ned Lamont framed the state’s position as a truth-in-labelling problem: “Prediction markets have branded themselves as legal and safe, but the reality is they are not adhering to Connecticut’s consumer protection standards and gaming laws, and they are not being truthful when they tell consumers that their activities are legal.” He added that legalising sports wagering in 2021 was meant to produce “a safe, responsibly regulated market for Connecticut consumers, not to open a free-for-all.”
The supply chain, and the ad buyers
Nine gaming service provider licensees received subpoenas: PayPal, LexisNexis, Plaid, Paysafecard, Integrity Compliance 360, SportRadar Solutions, Genius Sports Media, Genius Tech International and Socure. Apple App Store, Google Play, Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Stripe were also subpoenaed. The department states that none of these businesses is under investigation; they may simply hold information pertinent to it.
The fifteen media organisations subpoenaed are Hearst Connecticut Media, the Hartford Courant, Connecticut News Project, Norwich Bulletin, The Patch, The Day, ESPN, Fox61/Tegna, NBC Connecticut, WFSB/Gray Media, WTNH/WCTX Nexstar, Audacy, Connoisseur Media, iHeartMedia and Red Wolf Broadcasting. Local outlets and national sports broadcasters together suggests the state is looking at where the money for promotion went, not at the journalism. No outlet is described as a subject of the investigation.
Scale
The American Gaming Association estimates $40 billion will be wagered on the NFL through prediction markets this year. On the first day of the 2026 college football season, one prediction market reported nearly $250 million in trading volume on college football alone, according to the governor’s office.
For comparison, Connecticut licenses three platforms to take sports wagers: DraftKings (Foxwoods), FanDuel (Mohegan Sun) and Fanatics (Connecticut Lottery), all bound by the state’s technical standards and a 21-and-over age floor.
The health side, briefly
Mental Health and Addiction Services Commissioner Nancy Navarretta noted that “all gambling carries risk, and for some, that risk can become a serious problem,” and pointed to the state’s problem gambling helpline. Diana Goode, executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, said the state had built “meaningful consumer protections, safeguards for young people, responsible gambling requirements and access to resources for those who may experience harm,” and that “when organizations operate outside that framework, critical protections can be lost.”
What it sits inside
Connecticut sued Kalshi on 27 August seeking to block unlicensed sports wagers, and a federal judge in the district ruled in August that sports event contracts are illegal unlicensed gambling not sheltered by federal commodities law. The cease-and-desist orders extend the same theory to eight more platforms and, through the subpoenas, to the vendors and broadcasters that made their Connecticut customer acquisition possible. None of the nine operators’ responses appear in the CT News Junkie account, which is built from state statements and press releases; the platforms’ position remains that their contracts are federally regulated and outside state gambling law.