Utah Files 14 Criminal Charges Against Kalshi and Its Two Top Executives
Utah has filed 14 criminal charges against Kalshi, the prediction market operator, and two of its executives: chief executive Tarek Mansour and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara. The Salt Lake Tribune reported the filing on October 28, 2026, and the Associated Press reported it as well. The charges accuse Kalshi of breaking Utah's anti-gambling laws.
The counts are 12 charges of illegally promoting online gambling, one count of general gambling promotion, and one count of pattern of unlawful activity, which is a second-degree felony. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that 13 of the 14 counts are felonies and that each online gambling promotion charge corresponds to a bet. Mansour and Lopes Lara are co-founders of the company.
The criminal case follows a civil action. The Utah Attorney General filed a civil lawsuit against KalshiEX LLC, alleging that its prediction market is illegal gambling offered in Utah. In a statement provided to the Associated Press, Kalshi called the charges a "crazy overreach."
Under Utah law, offering online gambling to anyone in the state is a third-degree felony. The Attorney General's office has said a federal court ruled that Utah can enforce its laws against Kalshi, finding that Kalshi's federal registration does not shield its bets from state enforcement (Utah Attorney General).
Utah is not the first state to act criminally. Arizona became the first state to file criminal charges against Kalshi in March, but a federal judge later blocked that case.
The broader context here is a jurisdictional question. Kalshi's position rests on federal registration, and Utah's position rests on state statutes that prohibit offering gambling to residents. The Arizona and Utah cases have reached different results in federal court, which means operators of event-based contracts cannot yet rely on a single answer about where state law ends. Each per-bet count also changes the arithmetic of exposure. A charge tied to individual wagers, rather than to a company-level violation, makes the potential penalty scale with transaction volume, which is a structural point an operator's general counsel will weigh differently than a headline reader.
In my view, the outcome matters beyond Kalshi. Whichever way these cases land, the industry needs a settled answer on whether federal registration preempts state gambling law. A clear rule, even an unwelcome one, would let operators design geofencing, age and residency checks, and compliance controls against known requirements rather than against a moving set of court orders. The charges are allegations, and the cases will be decided on the record and in the courts. The question of state enforcement against prediction markets has moved from civil litigation into criminal court, and the people responsible for the company's operations are now named in that process.
