Gambling

Michigan's gaming board is examining questions raised by investigations of targeted betting promotions, but has not announced an investigation of DraftKings.

Two senior departures and four state-member exits have turned the National Council on Problem Gambling's $2m Kalshi partnership into a test of who a donor-funded harm-prevention body can credibly represent.

Ten weeks, $21,600 deposited and $10,702 lost: an undercover experiment found the VIP programme arrived after the red flags, and that the guardrails were the part of the product built to be cleared with a thumb.

Eight thousand licences issued by a regulator that licensed Stake on an ownership declaration it had already questioned: the Curaçao files show what offshore gambling regulation actually consists of when the customers are in countries where the operator is not allowed to sell.

The record of when a betting app pushes a user harder and when it warns them exists only inside the operators — so ProPublica is asking bettors to hand it over, and had 14 of a target 250 when it published.

Brazil went from taxing bets to blocking betting sites to switching the market off by decree — and the industry's first response was to warn that football sponsorships would end immediately.

A few hundred dollars on whether a named bank collapses is enough to put the deposit insurer's own ethics rules on the agenda. The regulated US exchange does not list the contracts; the offshore platform does.

A unanimous panel held that sports event contracts are not 'associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence' — so the federal commodities law Kalshi built its all-50-states pitch on does not displace Ohio's and Tennessee's gambling statutes.

The state's petition says a wager under another name is still a wager, and names two specific costs: 18-to-20-year-olds who can sign up on a product licensed for 21-and-over betting, and gambling tax revenue that funds schools and problem-gambling treatment.

Elliot Choy's face was replaced with a white man's in an ad that used his video. Kalshi told NPR the spot is old and that it no longer uses AI-generated ads — which confirms the ad ran, without saying how many others did.

A legal ban and a strong religious taboo still offer some protection. Coppins finds the more vulnerable boundary is whether young bettors recognize what they are doing as gambling.

Mexico's football federation is the first league to test whether a prediction market can sell bets under its name and club crests. The outcome turns on a fair-use defense that has already survived one challenge, from the NCAA.

Kalshi and Polymarket supplied nearly half of tracked NFL betting-app downloads in Week 2, while wallet data suggests event contracts are adding wagering rather than merely shifting it from sportsbooks.

Shareholders voted 133 million to 4 million to hand the Las Vegas Strip operator to Tilman Fertitta — an ambassador who is already the largest shareholder in Wynn Resorts and DraftKings — in a deal AP values at $17.6 billion once the assumed debt is counted.

The national problem-gambling council now says on the record that event contracts are gambling — while keeping the $2m its newest donor is putting into the initiative that studies the harm.

A second Ninth Circuit decision, this one on tribal lands, gives the Supreme Court a different vehicle for deciding whether event contracts are sports bets — and puts IGRA, UIGEA and tribal sovereignty into the same case as the Commodity Exchange Act.

Kalshi's clearinghouse asked the CFTC to approve margin for event contracts — sports stay fully collateralized, margined contracts are described as institutional-only, and the filing's own text leaves the retail FCM channel open, with the methodology redacted.

A senator's call for subpoenas puts a direct conflict question to prediction markets whose national reach depends on federal regulators.

Internal documents and 40 former employees describe a 2023 machine-learning model built to route free bets toward the customers who would lose the most, and a parallel model that would have flagged customers heading for a gambling crisis, shelved before it was ever presented.

Six prediction-market operators were given thirty days to get a Missouri gaming licence or stop taking sports bets from the state — the letters turn on a 21-and-over rule the attorney general says Kalshi's own member agreement contradicts, and on tax and treatment money the state says it never received.

CFTC staff opened the order-routing channel to software vendors that never register as brokers. A day later Kalshi had its first tribal partner and a sovereignty argument for the product — the tribes suing it in federal court had a different reading.

The prediction-market hub came down in April and the agreement has now concluded — but Yahoo kept Polymarket as an advertiser, which is the half of the arrangement that was doing the work.

The league has put on the record what its licensed sportsbooks may say on its airwaves: one approved product each, no company branding, no prediction markets — and the list of approved products is not public.

A 173-page House of Lords report finds the government "too passive" on digital gambling marketing and recommends a blanket advertising ban with carve-outs for the lottery and racecourses, drawing an angry response from the industry's lobby group.

A unanimous panel revived two California tribes' request to block Kalshi's sports event contracts on their reservations, holding that a bet entered from tribal land is class III gaming under IGRA — and that the CFTC's jurisdiction over swaps does not erase it.

A population study of 17.4 million Ontarians finds emergency visits for gambling disorders doubling after the province opened its online market to private operators, with the entire increase among men under 45 — and the authors' own caveat that these are rare events on a small base.

Entain reported £479m of first-half operating profit, then opened a consultation on cutting 400 customer care jobs — while telling a UK mayor that a higher tax on high-street slot machines would cost 1,470 shops and 15,900 jobs.

Both prediction markets have signed data and content deals with CNN, CNBC, Fox, Dow Jones and Substack while the courts decide whether they are gambling. The partnerships don't do any trading — they buy the one thing a contested product needs most.

Ten league and players-association bodies wrote to gambling regulators in 35 states and DC asking for uniform rules that permanently revoke betting privileges for anyone who threatens or harasses athletes — an enforcement job handed to states and operators, with the leagues' own betting revenue arrangements left off the table.

Ohio's gaming regulator ended its membership in the National Council on Problem Gambling by letter in June, disclosing it only when Massachusetts weighed the same step — the third state regulator to leave over the council's $2m partnership with prediction-market operator Kalshi.

A New Jersey Assembly committee unanimously approved a non-binding resolution telling sportsbooks and casinos to stop aiming personalized, athlete-fronted marketing at patrons they know to be problem gamblers — the first formal state-legislative answer to the FanDuel video that surfaced in July.

A survey of 1,800 parents finds 31 percent of betting households cut spending on groceries, rent or utilities to fund wagers or cover losses — while the tax revenue accrues to states and part of the cost lands on the safety net.

Olympic and world champions objected to a Novig campaign that ran Sweeney through a series of sports in minimal clothing. The actor is not only the face of it — the company says she is a strategic partner and equity holder, which puts the criticism on the business rather than on a hired spokesperson.

Unlicensed casinos are running Meta ads under Tesco's, Barclays's and Monzo's names, using other companies' brand trust as collateral for a pitch no licensed operator could legally make. Meta removed the ads once the Guardian asked.

Nine operators including Polymarket, Robinhood, Coinbase and Gemini were ordered to stop offering sports event contracts in Connecticut, and roughly 30 subpoenas went out — fifteen of them to media organisations and the rest to payment, data and identity vendors.

Robinhood now holds equity in two competing prediction market exchanges. The point of owning exchange capacity, its executive says, is having more input into how bets get resolved — three days after Kalshi wrongly settled a college football game.

Novig and Polymarket both bought NFL-season attention with celebrity-fronted campaigns within 48 hours. The backlash was about how the product is sold — while the question of whether these contracts are gambling or federally regulated financial products is still being litigated.

A prediction market settled an $18.6m college football market as a Western Michigan win before officials put one second back on the clock; when Michigan's Hail Mary landed, Kalshi clawed back the payouts. The same week, DraftKings built ads around users' withdrawal complaints.

Prediction market companies spent nearly $200m on digital advertising through July — money that state-regulated sportsbooks can no longer spend the same way, because prediction markets are supervised in Washington as exchanges rather than by the states that write gambling advertising rules.

A voluntary ban on front-of-shirt gambling sponsors pushed the money to sleeves, training kits and perimeter boards. Ten of twenty Premier League clubs now take commercial money from operators with no UK licence — the ones that owe their customers no affordability checks.

Legal NFL handle is projected flat for the first time since 2018, and the industry lobby blames prediction markets. Operator marketing spend is up more than 60% anyway — more money spent chasing the same pool.

A Guardian opinion column reads two recent scandals — Kalshi's lifetime ban of George Santos and Bill Simmons's on-air admission of proxy betting — as evidence that gambling enforcement now targets whoever makes himself impossible to ignore, not the structure that made the conduct ordinary.

Players at the 2026 US Open describe spectators betting on matches who talk at them mid-play to change the result. Nothing in the ATP, WTA or grand slam rule books gives umpires anything to act on — while the tournament itself signed Kalshi as a partner days before it began.

Texas bans online sports betting and its attorney general once ruled daily fantasy contests illegal gambling. He has not joined the 44 states arguing prediction markets are unlicensed betting — and Politico reported $12,000 in Kalshi-linked contributions to his PAC and Senate campaign.

An Ingham County judge converted a temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction blocking Kalshi's sports wagers in Michigan, with a $500,000-a-day geolocation penalty — and her findings name under-21 customers, unmet mental-health protections, and school, city and tribal revenue.

New Jersey filed a 332-page cert petition asking the justices to resolve whether prediction markets must follow state gambling law, after the Ninth Circuit broke with the Third. The state's brief also argues that a Kalshi win would make sports wagers at casinos and tribal books unlawful.

Kalshi struck a deal with the Weather Channel's owner to settle weather markets, and says climate and weather betting is its fastest-growing category. Scientists whose homes burned in the Eaton fire are asking what it means to wager on the disasters themselves.

A $14m Polymarket market on an Iranian missile strike put a journalist's life in danger when his reporting threatened the payout. Finn Brunton traces the lineage from a 1993 hoax espionage market to today's platforms, and argues they fulfill the crypto-anarchist design rather than the economist's.

The CFTC fined Gabriel Perez $172,000 for betting on the words Trump would use in speeches while employed as his teleprompter operator — the highest-profile insider case yet in the prediction-market boom.

Allwyn's interim CEO was personally sanctioned by the Gambling Commission in 2024 over money-laundering failures at William Hill, and holds a paid board seat at a 24-hour slot machine chain. Two MPs have asked the regulator what consideration his history received.