Utah Files 14 Criminal Charges Against Kalshi and Two 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.
Kalshi is a prediction market, a platform where users trade contracts that pay out according to how a real-world event turns out. 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: which government's rules govern the bet. 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, so 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. Because the charges attach to individual wagers rather than to a company-level violation, the potential penalty scales with transaction volume. An operator's general counsel will weigh that 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 build 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. 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.
