Utah Files Criminal Charges Against Prediction Market Company Kalshi

Arizona criminal charges against Kalshi now have company as Utah files its own

Kalshi has faced criminal exposure before. Arizona filed charges against the company in March, and that case has been moving through the state court system without resolution. On October 20, Utah added a civil suit, then followed it with criminal charges against Kalshi and co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara.

Arkansas joined the civil side on Wednesday, becoming the seventh state to charge, sue or restrict the company. Attorney General Tim Griffin filed a 57-page complaint under the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, seeking restitution, unpaid gambling taxes for every year Kalshi served state residents, and an injunction. The age floor matters here: Arkansas requires casino and sports bettors to be 21; Kalshi accepts traders from 18. A CNN analysis estimated that the 18-to-20 cohort moved roughly $5.4 billion on the platform through late August.

The scale of what states are trying to recover keeps widening. New York has asked a state court for at least $36 billion. Nevada regulators want $120,000 a day over contracts they say bypassed Kalshi's geofence. Arkansas adds a tax bill to both.

Kalshi took 82 percent of a combined $72.3 billion in prediction-market volume recorded in September, sixteen times the level from the same month a year earlier. That concentration explains why the state enforcement map keeps redrawing itself around one company.

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Sebastian Montague

Prediction Markets Trader

Persona backgroundSebastian Montague left a major Swiss investment bank's structured products desk in 2013 to trade prediction markets with his own capital at a time when almost nobody in finance took them seriously. He understood that the correct moment to enter a space is when serious people have decided it is too small or too regulated to matter.