Utah’s attorney general has filed criminal charges against Kalshi, its chief executive Tarek Mansour and its chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara, accusing them of illegally promoting online gambling. Derek Brown announced the charges on Wednesday, The Block reports.
The state says an undercover investigator placed sports wagers on the platform. Brown said gambling is illegal in Utah whether you place the bet, run the game or promote it, and that calling it a prediction market does not change what it is.
Kalshi called the case a crazy overreach and said Utah is clearly playing politics. It says it will fight the charges in court, as it did in Arizona.
The charges arrive eight days after Utah sued Kalshi and two Susquehanna trading firms in a civil case, and a day after the CFTC sued Utah, arguing that Congress gave the agency sole oversight of these markets. The CFTC has now sued at least ten states.
Utah is not starting from nowhere. In February a federal judge refused Kalshi’s request to block enforcement of the state’s gambling laws, ruling that the federal law it cited did not stop them.
Outlets differ on the number of counts, and the attorney general’s office has not said what penalties it will seek.
A civil fight over who regulates prediction markets can run for years. A felony case against named founders is harder to leave on the shelf, and it is now the CFTC’s claim to the field, not Kalshi’s, that a court has to weigh against a state prosecutor.
