For most of the past decade, the technology underneath a US sweepstakes casino was invisible by design. Operators marketed “free-to-play” social games, kept their vendor contracts private, and let a dual-currency wrapper of Gold Coins and Sweeps Coins do the legal heavy lifting. That arrangement collapsed in the first half of 2026. As of July 1, 2026, Indiana’s ban on dual-currency platforms is live, Maine’s follows in mid-July, and – for the first time – the individual suppliers that make up the stack are being dragged into court as named defendants rather than treated as neutral plumbing.
This is a disclosure story with a twist. The sweepstakes tech stack is finally being exposed – not through voluntary transparency reports but through civil litigation, statutory liability that now reaches vendors, and a wave of state bans. Below is a component-by-component analysis of what that stack looks like in 2026, who is suing whom, and why every layer – from GeoComply geolocation to Veriff KYC to Trustly payment rails – has become a legal liability rather than a competitive asset.
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The July 1 Cutoff That Redrew the Sweepstakes Map
The single most important date for the US sweepstakes industry in 2026 is July 1. That is when Indiana’s House Bill 1052 took effect, making Indiana the first state to enact a fresh ban in 2026 and the seventh state overall to prohibit dual-currency sweepstakes casinos outright. Maine’s LD 2007 lands roughly two weeks later, pushing the count to eight. The map that once covered nearly all fifty states has been carved into a shrinking patchwork, and operators now have to model state-by-state withdrawal risk instead of national growth.
Indiana HB 1052: $100,000 a Violation
Governor Mike Braun signed HB 1052 on March 13, 2026. The law defines a “sweepstakes game” as any online dual-currency or multi-currency contest that simulates casino, lottery, or sports-wagering formats – the exact Gold-Coin-plus-Sweeps-Coin structure the sector was built on. The Indiana Gaming Commission can impose civil penalties of up to $100,000 per violation, and crucially the penalty reaches out-of-state platforms doing business with Indiana residents, not just companies physically located in the state. Sweepstakes poker products such as Global Poker and ClubWPT Gold were explicitly carved out. Roughly ten platforms had to exit or face the six-figure exposure.
Maine LD 2007 and the Eighth Domino
Maine’s LD 2007 cleared the legislature after the Joint Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs submitted a divided report, and it takes effect in early-to-mid July 2026. Its practical effect is identical to Indiana’s: dual-coin operators must geofence Maine out. Together the two July bans confirm that 2026 is not a pause in the crackdown that began in 2025 – it is an acceleration.
The 16-State Blackout Zone
The cumulative effect is visible in the launch terms of new brands. Spinly, a sweepstakes casino entering the market in the first half of 2026, lists itself as unavailable across sixteen states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Washington, and West Virginia. That blackout zone – a mix of enacted bans, active enforcement, and cautious self-exclusion – is now a standard field in any 2026 operator’s compliance configuration.
Why the Tech Stack Suddenly Matters
For years the debate over sweepstakes casinos focused on the front-end wrapper: did the “no purchase necessary” alternate method of entry satisfy federal FTC prize-promotion guidance, and did Gold Coins have cash value? In 2026 the argument moved down the stack. Regulators and plaintiffs stopped arguing only about the coin mechanic and started subpoenaing the machinery behind it – the geolocation service, the identity-verification vendor, the RNG certifier, and the payment processor. The stack matters now because it is evidence.
A Stack Built to Stay Off the Record
Sweepstakes operators have historically disclosed almost nothing about their infrastructure. As of June 2026, no major US sweepstakes casino operator publicly names its identity-verification or KYC vendor in any public-facing document. Geolocation, KYC, and RNG certification are treated as sector standards that everyone assumes but no one confirms. That opacity was a feature – it kept partners insulated and made the whole arrangement look like ordinary software rather than gambling infrastructure.
From “Neutral Vendor” to Named Defendant
The insulation is gone. When the Los Angeles City Attorney named a KYC provider and multiple game studios as co-defendants, the message to the supplier market was blunt: your contract with a sweepstakes operator is no longer a back-office detail, it is potential exposure. Legal analysts at ZwillGen summarized the shift bluntly, noting that California’s AB 831 “bans sweepstakes casinos and expands liability to vendors.” The stack, in other words, is now the case.
The Anatomy of a Sweepstakes Stack in 2026
Strip away the marketing and a sweepstakes casino runs on the same layered infrastructure as a licensed real-money operator – often literally the same vendors. The difference is legal packaging, not engineering, and it is increasingly a mobile-first engineering problem: Access Newswire reported that 73% of sweepstakes gameplay happened on mobile devices in 2025, which is why so much of the geolocation and KYC engineering below is built for handsets first. The table below maps the canonical stack, its category leaders, public-disclosure status, and litigation exposure.
| Stack layer | Category leaders (2026) | Public disclosure | Litigation exposure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geolocation | GeoComply | Rarely named | High (compliance-critical) |
| Identity / KYC / AML | Sumsub, Veriff, Jumio | Never named publicly | Very high (Veriff named in LA suit) |
| Game content / RGS | Pragmatic Play, Evolution, Hacksaw Gaming | Partially visible in lobby | Very high (named in LA suit) |
| RNG certification | GLI, iTech Labs | Sometimes referenced | Medium (discovery target) |
| Payments | Trustly, Yodlee, ACH, prepaid, USDT/USDC | Partially visible at checkout | High (Trustly, Yodlee named) |
Geolocation: GeoComply’s Load-Bearing Wall
GeoComply is the dominant geolocation supplier and the load-bearing wall of the post-2025 model. Every state ban and every self-exclusion in the sixteen-state blackout zone is enforced at the geolocation layer, which means the accuracy and configuration of that service is now a compliance obligation rather than a nice-to-have. Operators that misconfigure a geofence and serve a banned state are not committing a marketing error – they are creating per-violation penalty exposure. For a deeper look at how these systems are benchmarked, our breakdown of the leading US gambling geolocation providers compares GeoComply against Xpoint and LocationSmart on accuracy and market share.
Identity and KYC: Sumsub, Veriff, Jumio
The identity layer is where the disclosure gap is widest and the legal exposure is now highest. Operators use the same identity-verification and document-checking vendors that power licensed sportsbooks and regulated iGaming – Sumsub, Veriff, and Jumio are the recognizable names – yet none are acknowledged in operator marketing. That silence ended the moment a KYC vendor was named as a defendant in Los Angeles. Anyone evaluating this layer should understand how the major igaming KYC and identity-verification vendors differ on price, speed, and compliance coverage, because those contracts are exactly what discovery now targets.
Payments and the Trustly Concentration
The payment stack looks deceptively simple from the player side but has become a concentration point for both regulators and litigants. Trustly has been the open-banking rail behind most of the cohort, and it was named explicitly in the August 2025 California complaint against VGW and several co-defendants. Visa and Mastercard tightened their gambling-merchant categorization in late 2025, forcing operators to revisit how transactions are tagged at the issuer level. The practical result is fewer payment options per state, more redemption friction, and a steady migration toward stablecoin redemption using USDT and USDC as a card-decline workaround. That migration was already mainstream well before the 2026 crackdown: Access Newswire found that 42% of sweepstakes platforms accepted cryptocurrency purchases in 2025, a trend Track360 documented further in May 2026, when it found Yolo Group’s sweepstakes brands running on USDC rails under Curacao GCB licensing as of the first quarter of 2026. Not every operator is moving slower, though: Iredell Free News reported in April 2026 that SpeedSweeps was processing redemptions in 24 to 48 hours with just a $20 minimum during the same quarter, underscoring how uneven redemption speed has become across the sector.
The Los Angeles Complaint: When Suppliers Became Defendants
The pivotal event of the crackdown was not a ban – it was a lawsuit. On August 29, 2025, Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto filed the first US government civil enforcement action against a sweepstakes casino, and she did not stop at the operator. The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, named a roster of more than twenty defendants that reached deep into the supply chain.
The 22-Defendant Roster
The suit targeted Sweepsteaks Ltd. (doing business as Stake.us), Easygo Group Holdings, Medium Rare N.V., streaming partner Kick, and Stake co-founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani. Then it went further: it named KYC provider Veriff, and game suppliers Pragmatic Play, Hacksaw Gaming, and live-casino giant Evolution – along with Evolution subsidiaries Big Time Gaming, Red Tiger, and NetEnt. The legal theory rested on alleged violations of state gambling law, the federal Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), and California’s Unfair Competition and False Advertising statutes.
Feldstein Soto’s “Real Money Gambling Racket”
The City Attorney’s framing left no doubt about intent. “Under the moniker of ‘America’s Social Casino’ and, despite claims that it is just a game, Stake.us is a rogue and real money gambling racket with destructive repercussions for its players,” Feldstein Soto said. By including game studios and a compliance provider, the lawsuit signaled a deliberate shift in enforcement strategy: suppliers and tech partners are now treated as active participants rather than neutral service providers.
Baltimore’s Discovery Gambit
If Los Angeles established that vendors can be named, Baltimore is establishing that the entire stack can be exposed. On March 4, 2026, the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore – represented by the Baltimore City Law Department and outside counsel DiCello Levitt – filed suit in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City against six major sweepstakes operators.
Six Operators, Four Offshore Jurisdictions
The defendants read like a census of the sector: Chumba Casino and LuckyLand Slots (VGW Holdings), McLuck (B2Services), Pulsz Casino (Yellow Social Interactive), Stake.us (Sweepsteaks Limited), High 5 Games (High 5 Entertainment), and Fortune Coins (Blazesoft). Baltimore’s complaint emphasizes that these are largely foreign-owned corporations incorporated in Malta, Cyprus, Estonia, and Canada – a structural point the city argues has helped them dodge accountability. The claim is that the dual-currency system satisfies all three elements of gambling under local law: consideration, chance, and prize.
What Discovery Could Expose
The reason the Baltimore case is a genuine tech-stack story is discovery. A lawsuit opens the door to the legal mechanism that can compel operators to hand over the contracts and technical documentation that have never been public. Should the case proceed to full discovery, plaintiffs could obtain vendor contracts, RNG certification records, geolocation service agreements, and payment-processing terms. DiCello Levitt Founding Partner Adam Levitt framed the stakes plainly: “Baltimore is taking on an industry that has deliberately blurred the line between gaming and gambling to avoid regulation and accountability… They’re designed to extract money through unfair, abusive, and deceptive practices.” The city is seeking civil penalties, injunctions, restitution, and disgorgement of profits.
Brown v. VGW and the Payment-Rail Defendants
The litigation trend did not start in a city hall. The private class-action bar got there first. Brown et al. v. VGW Holdings US Inc., filed in the Northern District of California in August 2025, was among the first cases to explicitly name the money layer of the stack as co-defendants alongside the operator.
The “Aid and Assistance” Theory
The Brown complaint advanced a theory that the sweepstakes model is “only possible with the aid and assistance of multiple partners,” and it named payment processors Trustly and Yodlee, KYC vendor Jumio, and prominent affiliate-influencer Brian Christopher. The same month, VGW exited the Canadian market, a sign that even the sector’s largest operator was recalculating its geographic footprint under legal pressure. The “aid and assistance” framing is precisely the argument that later resurfaced in the Los Angeles supplier suit – a coordinated legal thesis that no single vendor is neutral. For broader market context, see our coverage of best sweepstakes casino sites.
Trustly at the Center
Trustly’s repeated appearance – named in the California complaint against VGW – underscores why operators are diversifying away from single-Trustly dependence toward a wider mix of open-banking, ACH, and prepaid options. Payment-rail concentration is now a documented legal risk, and the engineering response is redundancy. Operators evaluating replacements should study how the leading gambling-grade payment processors handle merchant categorization and chargeback exposure, because the tagging problem Visa and Mastercard created in late 2025 is not going away.
California’s AB 831: Statutory Liability for the Whole Stack
The bans matter for their reach, but California’s AB 831 matters for its architecture. Governor Gavin Newsom signed it on October 11, 2025, after unanimous votes of 36-0 in the Senate and 63-0 in the Assembly. It took effect January 1, 2026, closing the promotional-game exemption that sweepstakes casinos had used to operate legally under the California Gambling Control Act; the full text of AB 831 is on the state legislature’s site.
What the Statute Names
AB 831 is the first ban written to target the stack rather than just the operator. Continued operation after January 1, 2026 is a criminal misdemeanor carrying fines up to $25,000 per violation and up to one year in county jail for willful violations – and the liability language extends to the parties that supply the machine: the payment processor, the geolocation provider, the gaming-content supplier, the platform provider, and the media affiliate. In other words, the statute codified exactly what the Los Angeles and Baltimore lawsuits argued in litigation.
The Vendor-Liability Precedent
The trade lobby understood the stakes immediately. Jeff Duncan, Executive Director of the Social Gaming Leadership Alliance, called the vote “incredibly disappointing,” warning that the ban could cost the state roughly $1 billion, “jeopardizes California jobs,” and would widen economic gaps between tribes while slowing digital innovation. Whatever the merits of that economic argument, AB 831 set a template other legislatures can copy – and a supplier that wants to serve the California market now faces criminal exposure, not just a lost contract.
The Ban Ledger: Eight States and Counting
The regulatory story is best read as a ledger. Eight states have enacted outright bans, several more are enforcing through cease-and-desist campaigns, and a third tier has bills in final votes. The table below tracks the enacted bans with their bill numbers, signing, effective dates, and penalties.
| State | Bill | Effective | Max penalty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Montana | SB 555 | Oct 1, 2025 | Up to $50,000 / offense + felony |
| Nevada | SB 256 | Oct 1, 2025 | Category B felony |
| Connecticut | SB 1235 / PA 25-112 | Oct 1, 2025 | Regulatory penalties |
| New Jersey | A 5447 | Aug 2025 | Regulatory penalties |
| New York | S 5935A / Ch. 605 | Dec 8, 2025 (signed) | $10,000–$100,000 / violation |
| California | AB 831 | Jan 1, 2026 | $25,000 / violation + jail |
| Indiana | HB 1052 | Jul 1, 2026 | Up to $100,000 / violation |
| Maine | LD 2007 | Jul 2026 | Regulatory penalties |
The 2025 Foundation
The foundation was poured in 2025. Montana’s SB 555 was the first to reclassify dual-currency products as gambling, taking effect October 1, 2025 alongside Nevada’s SB 256 and Connecticut’s SB 1235. New Jersey acted in August, and New York capped the year when Governor Hochul signed S 5935A on December 8, 2025, after the state’s June 2025 cease-and-desist wave to twenty-six operators set a template other attorneys general reused.
The 2026 Wave and the Pending Tier
2026 opened with California’s AB 831 already live and closed the first half with Indiana and Maine. Behind them, Oklahoma’s SB 1589, Tennessee, and Louisiana are in advanced legislative or enforcement stages, and Louisiana’s Gaming Control Board has already issued dozens of cease-and-desist letters. Readers tracking where the category still operates can consult our running state-by-state map of legal sweepstakes casino sites, which is updated as each ban takes effect.
The Supplier Exodus
Litigation and legislation produced a predictable second-order effect: the highest-profile suppliers started leaving on their own terms rather than waiting to be named again.
Pragmatic Play’s “Evolving Legislation”
Pragmatic Play became the first top-tier studio to pull its content from the US sweepstakes market around September 2, 2025, citing “regulatory developments and evolving legislation.” For a content supplier of Pragmatic’s scale, exiting a market where its titles were a draw is a costly signal – one made cheaper only by the alternative of appearing on the next enforcement roster, as it later did in Los Angeles.
The Live-Dealer Retreat
Live dealer content was no fringe feature going into the crackdown – Access Newswire found that 31% of sweepstakes platforms offered live dealer games in 2025 – which is precisely why Evolution and Hacksaw Gaming pulling content from California as the AB 831 deadline approached mattered so much, retreating from the largest single state market rather than accept criminal exposure. The live-dealer layer is the most visibly “casino-like” component of the stack – a real dealer streaming a real roulette wheel is hard to reconcile with the “just a social game” defense, which makes the studios that supply it obvious targets. For broader market context, see our coverage of leading online casino sites.
Follow the Money: Market Size Under Pressure
The crackdown is aimed at a genuinely large market, which is why operators have fought so hard to preserve it – and why capital kept flowing in even as the legal risk mounted. In August 2025, AI-powered social casino MyPrize raised $21 million at a $250 million valuation to scale its stack, according to SCCG Management, a sign that investors were still betting on the category just as the Los Angeles and Baltimore litigation was taking shape. Eilers & Krejcik Gaming (EKG) pegged the sweepstakes segment at roughly $3.1 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2022, rising to a projected $11 billion in 2025 – a figure CU Independent corroborated in its own 2025 reporting, citing industry data that likewise put US sweepstakes revenue at about $11 billion, with roughly 60% of the market described, via G&M News, as casual, low-spend participation rather than habitual play. Yogonet added the demographic and spending texture behind that number, reporting in July 2025 that average revenue per user had climbed 17% annually since 2020, even as 58% of sweepstakes casino players fell in the 25-44 age bracket. The 2024 baseline landed at more than $10.6 billion in Gold Coin purchases and about $3.4 billion in net gaming revenue after prize redemptions – a figure that rivals several states tracked in the American Gaming Association’s commercial gaming revenue tracker for the licensed market the bans are meant to protect.
The $11 Billion Peak
2025 looks, in hindsight, like the peak. KPMG separately projected that global sweepstakes revenue would go beyond $14.3 billion in 2025, and as of June 2026, RG.org’s updated modeling still points to $11–14 billion in Gold Coin sales and $9–10 billion in prize payouts for the year – enormous numbers for a category operating without a single state gaming license. That scale is exactly what made the sector attractive to litigants seeking disgorgement and to states eyeing the tax base of regulated alternatives.
2026 Scenarios: Strict, Base, Optimistic
2026 is where the bans start to bite. Analyst scenarios diverge sharply depending on how many additional states fall, and the range is wide enough that KPMG has publicly modeled revenues anywhere from $4.6 billion to $14.3 billion. The table below shows the three working scenarios built on 2024–25 benchmarks and a stable 68–72% payout ratio.
| 2026 scenario | Gold Coin purchases | Sweeps redemptions | Net revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strict (more bans) | $10–11B | ~$8B | $3.0–3.4B |
| Base case | $12–13B | $8.5–9.5B | $3.6–4.2B |
| Optimistic (bans stall) | $15–16B | ~$10B | $4.7–5.0B |
The Marketing Choke Point
The stack does not end at the product. Customer acquisition is its own layer, and in 2026 it tightened as sharply as the legal one.
Platform De-Certification
Google made sweepstakes-casino brands ineligible for ad certification across its display and search inventories during 2025, and Meta has incrementally narrowed the targeting categories available to dual-coin operators through 2026. Losing paid search and social targeting removes the two most scalable acquisition channels at once, pushing operators toward affiliates and organic – channels that carry their own legal exposure.
The Influencer Liability Question
Affiliate risk stopped being theoretical when Brown v. VGW named influencer Brian Christopher as a co-defendant. If a content creator promoting Sweeps Coins can be sued alongside the operator, the calculus for every affiliate in the space changes – even as the affiliate economics keep expanding. Track360 reported in May 2026 that crypto-sweeps overlays were adding USDT-denominated CPA payouts through the first and second quarters of 2026, growing the very affiliate tech stack that plaintiffs’ lawyers are now scrutinizing. The result is a marketing stack that is at once more expensive and more legally fraught. Some operators are hedging with non-dual-coin brand families, following the VGW “Just Slots” template, to test compliant products without bleeding the legacy customer base.
Beyond the Standard Coverage: What the B2B Guides Skip
Search the phrase “sweepstakes casino tech stack” and the results are dominated by B2B development guides – vendor blogs from firms like BettoBlock, GammaSweep, and Kodedice that walk prospective operators through Node.js back ends, Unity front ends, and “essential features” for launching a platform. The pitch keeps getting faster: TRUEiGTECH announced in August 2026 that its updated TIGSweepstakes stack – now bundling dual-wallet flows, CRM, and anti-fraud controls, according to Business Insider – could get a US operator live in just 4 to 6 weeks, and Track360’s May 2026 tracking of Spree Casino found it running on a similar third-party turnkey stack, paying affiliates $40 to $70 in CPA per first-time deposit during the first quarter of 2026. They are useful build manuals and useless risk assessments. Not one addresses the fact that the stack they are selling is now enumerated in civil complaints.
The Litigation-Discovery Gap
Even the strongest news analysis of the sector – trade-press coverage of the 2026 operator surge – tends to stop at the payment layer and the operator’s own adaptation playbook. What that coverage omits is the mechanism by which the stack becomes public: discovery in the Baltimore case, the supplier-naming strategy in Los Angeles, and the vendor-liability language baked into AB 831. Those three threads, taken together, mean the industry’s technical documentation is one court order away from the record.
The Component-Liability Map
The other omission is a clear map of which component carries which risk. A discovery request in a case like Baltimore’s does not ask for “the tech stack” in the abstract; it enumerates specific artifacts. An illustrative version of what plaintiffs’ counsel is likely to demand:
{
"discovery_request": "sweepstakes_operator_stack",
"artifacts": [
{ "layer": "geolocation", "docs": ["service_agreement", "geofence_config", "state_blocklist"] },
{ "layer": "kyc_aml", "docs": ["vendor_contract", "verification_logs", "sar_records"] },
{ "layer": "rng", "docs": ["certification_report", "test_lab_letter"] },
{ "layer": "game_content", "docs": ["studio_license", "revenue_share_terms"] },
{ "layer": "payments", "docs": ["processor_agreement", "mcc_tagging", "redemption_ledger"] }
]
}That enumeration is the real “tech stack disclosure” of 2026 – not a marketing page, but a litigation exhibit. Our analysis of how AI fraud detection in iGaming evolved through 2026 covers the same KYC-layer tooling operators must now document under oath, and our look at RNG certification approaches explains the GLI and iTech Labs records a discovery request would target.
What Comes Next: Five Predictions for H2 2026
The trajectory of the first half of 2026 makes several developments in the back half of the year highly likely.
- More vendor defendants. The Los Angeles supplier-naming strategy will be copied. Expect at least one additional state or municipal action that names a geolocation, KYC, or payment vendor as a co-defendant before year-end.
- A discovery milestone. If the Baltimore case survives early motions, the first tranche of compelled vendor contracts and RNG certification records could become part of the public record – the first true involuntary disclosure of a sweepstakes stack.
- Two to four more bans. Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Louisiana are the most advanced; expect the enacted-ban count to reach double digits by early 2027.
- Continued supplier flight. Following Pragmatic Play and Evolution, additional tier-one studios will formally exit US sweepstakes to protect their regulated-market licenses.
- The pivot to prediction markets and non-dual-coin brands. Operators will accelerate migration toward CFTC-adjacent prediction-market models and single-currency social products that sidestep the consideration-chance-prize test entirely.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a “sweepstakes casino tech stack”?
It is the layered infrastructure behind a dual-currency social casino: geolocation (GeoComply), identity and KYC/AML verification (Sumsub, Veriff, Jumio), game content and RGS (Pragmatic Play, Evolution, Hacksaw), RNG certification (GLI, iTech Labs), and payment rails (Trustly, Yodlee, ACH, prepaid, USDT/USDC). It is largely the same stack licensed operators use, packaged under a promotional-sweepstakes wrapper.
Why is the tech stack being “disclosed” in 2026?
Not voluntarily. It is being exposed through civil litigation (the Los Angeles and Baltimore suits, plus Brown v. VGW), through discovery that can compel vendor contracts and certification records, and through statutes like California’s AB 831 that extend liability to named vendor categories.
Which vendors have been named as defendants?
The Los Angeles City Attorney’s August 2025 suit named KYC provider Veriff and studios Pragmatic Play, Hacksaw Gaming, and Evolution (plus Big Time Gaming, Red Tiger, and NetEnt). Brown v. VGW named payment processors Trustly and Yodlee, KYC vendor Jumio, and influencer Brian Christopher.
When did Indiana’s sweepstakes ban take effect?
Indiana HB 1052, signed by Governor Mike Braun on March 13, 2026, took effect July 1, 2026. It carries civil penalties of up to $100,000 per violation and reaches out-of-state operators. Sweepstakes poker products such as Global Poker and ClubWPT Gold are exempt.
How many states have banned sweepstakes casinos?
Eight states have enacted outright bans as of mid-2026: Montana, Nevada, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, California, Indiana, and Maine. Several more – including Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Louisiana – are pursuing bans or active enforcement.
What does California’s AB 831 do differently?
AB 831 is the first ban written to reach the whole stack. Beyond banning operators, it extends liability to payment processors, geolocation providers, gaming-content suppliers, platform providers, and media affiliates, with fines up to $25,000 per violation and possible jail time for willful violations.
How big is the US sweepstakes market?
Eilers & Krejcik Gaming estimated roughly $3.1 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2022 rising to about $11 billion in 2025, with 2024 net revenue near $3.4 billion. 2026 net-revenue scenarios range from about $3.0 billion (strict) to $5.0 billion (optimistic), and KPMG has modeled a wide $4.6–14.3 billion band.
Can players in banned states still access these sites?
Compliant operators geofence banned states out at the geolocation layer, which is why a new brand like Spinly lists sixteen unavailable states. Continued operation in a banned state exposes both the operator and, increasingly, its vendors to per-violation penalties and criminal liability.
