Gambling Lawsuits in United States: Every Case, Court and Settlement

40 gambling lawsuits in the United States are on record as of November 14, 2026, 14 of them class actions and 3 suits by state attorneys general. Four lines of litigation dominate: whether virtual chips are gambling, sweepstakes casinos, prediction markets such as Kalshi, and gambling-addiction suits against sportsbooks.

The question this page answers is who has actually been paid. A handful of US settlements still take claims, and they come first below; no addiction suit and no prediction-market suit has paid anyone.

Counts rendered from the case record at build time; checked November 14, 2026.

Can players recover losses in the United States? What the courts have decided

5 US matters accept claims from players as of November 14, 2026: the Pulsz six-state settlement to November 30, 2026, the High 5 Games Washington settlement to January 4, 2027, the Riverside Resort & Casino data breach settlement to January 4, 2027 and the New York Attorney General's VGW Sweeps Coin redemption for one year after August 31, 2026, and no gambling-addiction suit and no prediction-market suit has paid a consumer.

A complaint states one side's allegations, and only the court's orders decide anything. Records from other countries are collected under gambling lawsuits by country.

Settlements taking claims now: Pulsz, High 5 and the New York VGW redemption

Each of these carries a court or regulator document that fixes the deadline, and each payout figure below is an estimate from the notice, not a promise. The Riverside row is a casino data breach settlement, listed because it also takes claims today.

The four differ in how the money reaches players. Pulsz pays mostly in Gold Coins, the game's virtual currency, with a cash election capped across all members at about USD 3.5 million, and any reduction is paid in Gold Coins.

High 5's fund is paid in instalments over up to eight years and scaled by the valid claims and the amounts actually paid in. The New York redemption pays cash, but only to New Yorkers who held Sweeps Coins on June 2, 2025 and did not receive VGW's 2025 phase-out notice.

Deadlines move, so the tracker of open gambling class action settlements by deadline is the place to check before filing. Filing is always free, and this site is not a law firm and not an administrator.

Where players have been paid: the Washington social-casino line and Kentucky

The money record of US gambling litigation sits almost entirely in one courthouse: 8 class settlements with a fund, USD 663,750,000 in total including the Pulsz estimate and the High 5 floor, and the largest social casino funds were approved by the Western District of Washington after the Ninth Circuit held on March 28, 2018 that virtual chips are a thing of value under the state's Recovery of Money Lost at Gambling Act.

Counsel's own tally for the Washington social casino settlements of 2020 to 2022 is USD 651 million. The table lists ten of them.

The High 5 case is the only one in the line that reached a verdict.

After a four-day trial the jury returned its verdict on February 7, 2025, and on June 11, 2025 Judge Cartwright entered a class judgment of USD 24,928,712.17, the first class-action judgment against a social casino; the parties then settled for the fund in the table above.

Kentucky produced the sweepstakes casino settlements: Chumba Casino and LuckyLand Slots (USD 11,750,000, claims closed March 6, 2023) and Pulsz (USD 1,320,000, claims closed January 29, 2024), with a third, Funzpoints, closing the same day.

We did not retrieve the Henderson County documents, so those amounts rest on the notices. SciPlay's six-state settlement of USD 5,000,000 reached the paid status on March 6, 2026.

The DraftKings NFT settlement is the only DraftKings or FanDuel class payout on record, and the Federal Trade Commission's Fortnite refund order of USD 245 million is a regulator order rather than a class action. To see why the Washington line exists, read why virtual chips count as gambling in Washington State.

Where no one has been paid: addiction suits, prediction markets, Roblox

No duty-of-care or gambling-addiction suit has produced a payout to a US player: the Third Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Antar v. BetMGM on April 28, 2025 (No. 24-1364), and the Pennsylvania class action Macek v. DraftKings was dismissed on March 23, 2026 and is on appeal (3d Cir. No. 26-1903).

Two individual suits, Dalessandro in New Jersey and Fischer in the Southern District of New York, were dismissed in July 2025 after settlements on confidential terms as reported.

A secondary tracker counts no federal multidistrict litigation and no certified class in sportsbook addiction litigation as of November 2026, and our page on gambling addiction lawsuits against operators lists each suit.

Antar alleged that Borgata and BetMGM VIP hosts sent more than 1,800 text messages while he gambled over USD 24 million, one side's account.

The Third Circuit held in a non-precedential opinion that the texts had no capacity to mislead and that gambling losses are not an ascertainable loss under New Jersey law (2025 WL 1219316).

In Macek, Judge Leeson held on March 23, 2026 that DraftKings owed the plaintiffs no duty of care, and the plaintiffs appealed on April 17, 2026.

The prediction-market cases, 7 on record, hold no consumer settlement, no claim form and no payment. Colvin v. Roblox (N.D. Cal. 3:23-cv-04146) also has no settlement and no claim form, and its motion to dismiss stood as of December 10, 2025. See prediction market lawsuits: Kalshi, Polymarket and the states for the cases themselves.

Lottery disputes are mostly individual. In the Circle K lottery ticket lawsuit (Maricopa County Superior Court), filed on February 17, 2026, a retailer seeks a declaration of ownership of a ticket tied to a USD 12.8 million prize held by the Arizona Lottery, and the next hearing is set for December 15, 2026.

Fund figures are gross; Pulsz is the notice's estimate and High 5 is the floor of its range.

Class actions and mass claims: certified, settled or sent to arbitration

14 class actions make up the largest block of US gambling litigation, 2 of them against sweepstakes casinos, 1 against sportsbooks and daily fantasy operators and 4 against social casinos.

The rest are spread over loot boxes, prediction markets, data breaches, advertising and a few other categories, and the counts by category are on the category pages listed further down.

Sweepstakes filings cluster by venue. Press counts, which are secondary, put 13 active suits in Franklin County, Alabama in July 2025 and 15 federal filings in Utah in one week of late 2025, and the cases are removed, stayed or compelled into arbitration at different rates.

The question for each class action is whether it stayed in court. The step-by-step path from complaint to payout is in how a gambling class action works, step by step.

Arbitration clauses: which courts kept players in court

0 US cases are stayed, most of them pending arbitration, and the courts split: the Ninth Circuit affirmed the denial of Huuuge's and DoubleDown's motions to compel arbitration in 2019 and 2020, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled on the social casino clauses on April 25, 2025, and the District of Massachusetts confirmed a Stake.us arbitration award on October 16, 2026.

The Alabama Supreme Court reversed the Franklin Circuit Court and remanded in Zynga v. Mills and Huuuge v. Gann, per a secondary copy of the opinion; the order channels those suits into arbitration.

The Massachusetts confirmation of the Stake.us award is the first confirmed arbitral ruling on a sweepstakes casino's terms, while the Northern District of California kept the VGW spouses' case in court on September 18, 2026.

The standing of non-players and the arbitration clauses decide whether a loss-recovery suit reaches a judge at all, and the pending appeals are tracked under gambling cases and arbitration clauses.

Regulator and state cases in court

3 attorney-general suits and 5 regulator-filed cases are on record, and New York alone accounts for 2 of the attorney-general suits.

State attorneys general against operators

The 2026 wave of state suits targets two products: sweepstakes casinos (Florida against VGW and Stake.us on August 19, 2026, Kentucky against VGW on June 17, 2026, Baltimore against six operators on March 4, 2026) and prediction markets (Michigan, Washington, New York and Nevada against Kalshi), and Washington's suit against Playtika and Aristocrat of February 3, 2026 is the first state action against social-casino publishers.

Washington's complaint alleges more than USD 225 million

The prediction-market suits by states moved fastest. Nevada's Gaming Control Board sued Kalshi in Carson City on February 17, 2026 and won a preliminary injunction from the bench on April 3, 2026.

Michigan obtained a temporary restraining order on June 29, 2026 from Judge Aquilina, and in Washington Judge McHale granted a preliminary injunction on July 20, 2026 and entered a final order on August 13, 2026. of consumer spending on the two publishers' games since 2020, one side's allegation. The full set of enforcement suits sits under regulators and attorneys general in court.

Federal agencies: CFTC, FTC and the U.S. Attorneys

Federal agencies appear on both sides of the record: the CFTC has sued 6 states to protect prediction markets, the FTC obtained the USD 245 million Fortnite refund order (claims closed July 9, 2025) and the USD 20 million Genshin Impact order, and the U.S. Attorneys took USD 130,131,645 from Wynn Las Vegas and USD 46.8 million from 5Dimes by forfeiture.

Wynn's amount comes from a non-prosecution agreement of September 6, 2024, and the 5Dimes forfeiture dates to September 30, 2020, with the Justice Department release not retrieved.

The Nevada Gaming Commission settled four disciplinary complaints by stipulation (Resorts World USD 10.5 million, Steve Wynn USD 10 million, MGM USD 8.5 million, Wynn Las Vegas USD 5.5 million), regulator disciplinary proceedings and not court judgments. The suits against states are collected under states sued by the CFTC.

Lawsuits by state: the ten states with the most cases

The table lists the ten states with the most cases on record; every other state has its own hub.

The full ranking sits on the gambling lawsuits by US state tracker.

Supreme and appellate court rulings: the timeline

5 cases on record sit before the U.S. Supreme Court or a state's highest court and 11 before a court of appeals, and the line that matters most today runs from Murphy v. NCAA on May 14, 2018 to the three Kalshi petitions whose responses are due at the Supreme Court on December 7, 2026.

The Third Circuit held in Kalshi v. Flaherty that sports event contracts are swaps on a CFTC-designated market and that federal law preempts New Jersey's enforcement, with Judge Roth dissenting.

The Ninth Circuit and the Sixth Circuit, each 3-0, reached the opposite result in Nevada, Ohio and Tennessee, and amicus briefs on the New Jersey petition came from Ohio and 38 other states, tribes and the NFL.

The Ninth and Third Circuits now disagree on whether the Commodity Exchange Act preempts state gambling law for sports event contracts, and the Supreme Court has not acted on the petitions (26-299, 26-338 and 26-344). The wider list of high-court dockets is under pending appeals and high court gambling cases.

Cases by category

The cases fall into the categories below, and the two newest, prediction markets and sweepstakes casinos, are now also the largest.

Lawsuits by company

Twelve operators and publishers account for most of the record, and only two of them, VGW and High 5 Games, have a settlement taking claims today, with Pulsz's operator Yellow Social Interactive a third through its six-state settlement.

What changed in the last 60 days

0 US cases were filed and 6 changed status between September 15 and November 14, 2026, 4 of them prediction-market cases. The ten most recent steps follow, newest first.

• 2026-11-13: the CFTC sued Louisiana in the Eastern District of Louisiana (2:26-cv-02612) (GL-US-0655)
• 2026-11-04: a preliminary injunction on remand bars Kalshi sports contracts on Blue Lake and Chicken Ranch lands, per press reports; the order was not retrieved (GL-US-0826)
• 2026-11-02: the Guardians pitch-rigging case, E.D.N.Y. 1:25-cr-00346, a pending prosecution in which the defendants are charged and the indictment states allegations only (GL-US-0461)
• 2026-10-28: Utah filed criminal charges against Kalshi and its founders in Salt Lake County (261912852); the record states allegations only (GL-US-0631)
• 2026-10-16: the District of Massachusetts confirmed the Stake.us arbitration award (GL-US-0256)
• 2026-10-06: the Ninth Circuit opened No. 26-6577, VGW's appeal from the order denying arbitration (GL-US-0209)
• 2026-09-30: Vest v. DraftKings was filed in the District of Massachusetts (1:26-cv-14462) (GL-US-0413)
• 2026-09-25: the Sixth Circuit affirmed in Kalshi v. Ohio (26-3196) (GL-US-0604)
• 2026-09-16: the Ninth Circuit reversed in part in Blue Lake Rancheria v. Kalshi (GL-US-0826)
• 2026-09-02: New Jersey petitioned for certiorari in No. 26-299, Kalshi's response due 2026-12-07 (GL-US-0602)

Most of the movement was in prediction markets, where state suits, federal appeals and the CFTC's own suits against states run in parallel. Outside that area, the sweepstakes casino cases moved through arbitration rulings and state attorney-general filings, and the addiction cases moved through the Third Circuit appeal in Macek.

The running list of changes is on what changed in gambling litigation in the last 60 days.

Courts, databases and how to read a US citation

A federal docket number such as 2:18-cv-00525 (W.D. Wash.) reads as division 2, filed 2018, civil case 525, in the Western District of Washington, and the court's own documents sit on PACER, with free copies on CourtListener's RECAP archive and on GovInfo for the opinions courts choose to publish.

A state case number such as 26-2-04647-6 SEA is King County Superior Court's format, with year, case type and sequence.

A reporter citation such as 172 F.4th 220 reads as volume 172 of the Federal Reporter, Fourth Series, starting at page 220, and in that case it is the Third Circuit's Kalshi opinion of April 6, 2026. Supreme Court dockets such as 26-299 run by term and are public on the Court's site.

The status words in the tables are the record's own vocabulary: filed, motion-to-dismiss, settled-preliminary, settled-final, claims-open, claims-closed, paid, judgment, appealed and stayed. A docket entry is a step and not a decision, and claims-closed means only that the claim period ended.

Press-hosted copies of orders and law-firm trackers are leads, cited as "per the court tracker", and never the only source for a status in the tables above. The same records are downloadable under open data: download the case database.

Questions people ask

Is there a gambling lawsuit payout per person right now?

Yes for a few settlements only: Pulsz (estimated 23 percent of net spend in cash before deductions, claims to November 30, 2026), High 5 Games (estimated from a USD 12 million floor less up to 35 percent fees, pro rata on purchases, claims to January 4, 2027) and the New York VGW redemption (about USD 1 per Sweeps Coin held on June 2, 2025, for one year after August 31, 2026). The method is explained under class action payout per person.

The live list of claims is kept under open gambling class action settlements by deadline.

Can I sue a sportsbook or casino for gambling addiction losses?

You can file, and about a dozen plaintiffs have, but no US court has awarded a gambler damages for addiction losses: Antar lost at the Third Circuit, Macek was dismissed, and the two settled cases are confidential. Grounds that have worked elsewhere are covered under can you sue a casino or sportsbook: grounds that have worked.

Is sports gambling legal in the United States?

Since Murphy v. NCAA (U.S. Supreme Court, May 14, 2018, 16-476) each state decides, so the answer is a state law plus, for sports event contracts, the court order that governs Kalshi in that state. The federal background is in what the Wire Act, UIGEA and PASPA actually decided.

Where is the Kalshi status for my state?

The status is a court order with a date, not a yes or no: Kalshi sports contracts are blocked by court order in Nevada, Michigan and Washington, under a temporary Louisiana order of November 12, 2026 that lapses unless extended, and available under federal court orders in New Jersey and Arizona. Every state is listed under Kalshi court status in every state.

What this page does not cover

Ten states have banned dual-currency sweepstakes casinos by statute since August 2025, a legislative change listed by a secondary source and not read from the chaptered laws; the current list sits under sweepstakes casino bans by state.

Federal law also limits gambling loss deductions to 90 percent from tax year 2026, and no lawsuit challenging the cap was found as of November 14, 2026; this page gives no tax advice.

Non-US cases are on the country pages and in all gambling lawsuits by category.

Questions about debt or treatment are outside this record, and addiction help is listed under gambling helplines by country.

Sources and method

Of the 40 cases on this page, 31 carry a status read directly from an order, docket or filed complaint; the rest rest on court press releases, regulator filings, administrator notices and the trackers named in the tables, each flagged where it applies.

Primary sources are PACER and RECAP dockets, GovInfo opinions, the Ninth, Third and Sixth Circuit opinions, Supreme Court dockets, CFTC and FTC releases, state attorney general releases and complaints, and administrator notices.

Our how every case is sourced and checked page sets out the rules.

The log of fixes is on the corrections page.

GamblingLawsuits.org is a non-commercial project that takes no money from operators, affiliates or law firms; filing a settlement claim is always free, and we are not a law firm and not a claims administrator.