Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide sports betting ban in 2018, gambling has taken off in the United States. Enabled by popular apps, the practice has become a common fixture in daily life amid an inescapable barrage of advertisements urging users to start gambling away their hard-earned cash.
The rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of practically any type of event, has accelerated the trend even further, triggering what experts are warning is a massive increase in gambling addiction.
And now, it turns out that even the National Council on Problem Gambling, the largest nonprofit in the US designed to address gambling addiction, is secretly taking donations from Kalshi — a revelation that’s thrown the group into chaos, as Barron’s reports.
A recent board meeting about a major donation required attendees to sign a non-disclosure agreement, setting a concerning precedent for the nonprofit. At the meeting, NCPG executive director Heather Maurer, who had assumed her role just three months prior, announced that Kalshi was poised to donate $2 million — the second largest donation in the nonprofit’s history.
Understandably, the news that one of the biggest suspected contributors to gambling addiction was looking to fund a nonprofit that’s trying to address the problem was met with plenty of skepticism. The deal, which Maurer had finalized behind the board’s back, “landed like a bombshell in the gambling addiction advocacy community,” per Barron’s.
Taking a donation from money is like a “national council on teenage sex abuse taking money from Jeffrey Epstein,” longtime NCPG member Marc Lefkowitz told the publication.
Members and donors, including state-run gambling regulatory agencies, started fleeing the organization, eventually culminating in Maurer’s resignation last month. The departure, remaining members worry, undermined the NCPG’s credibility and authority.
While prediction platforms like Kalshi maintain that they’re not gambling companies — the space is technically being federally regulated as a financial exchange, not a sportsbook, by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — plenty of states would disagree. As such, New York sued the company in late July, alleging that it was running an “illegal gambling operation.”
State legislators have long pushed the Supreme Court to review the burgeoning legal battle.
For now, prediction platforms operate in a major legal grey area, allowing practically anybody above a certain age threshold to roll the dice on event contracts.
Kalshi told Barron’s that its donation to the NCPG was meant to “protect traders, since all financial markets carry risk.”
“Sadly, there seems to be more concern about optics and office politics than consumer protections,” the company added.
During Maurer’s ten-month tenure at the helm of the NCPG, the group’s efforts of running the 1-800-Gambler gambling addiction helpline collapsed. While the nonprofit switched to a new 1-800-My-Reset helpline, members worry the council still has a lot of catching up to do.
Kalshi decided not to include the number on its website on in its ads, an inclusion Maurer reportedly never pushed for.
The situation certainly doesn’t bode well, considering the ever-rising popularity in sports gambling in the US. Kalshi and Polymarket, in particular, are supercharging the trend, with even major news organizations, including CBS News and CNN, embracing the prediction markets in a risk to their journalistic integrity.
Worse yet, platforms like Kalshi are serving as a safe haven for those who bankrupted themselves on sports betting websites. As NPR reported earlier this month, a man who ended up with around $75,000 in debt thanks to his online sportsbook obsession simply transitioned to using Kalshi after being banned from DraftKings and FanDuel.
“Betting $10 became a couple hundred, and that became a couple hundred more, then thousands more,” he told NPR. “And before long I was more than $25,000 in the red.”
A Kalshi spokeswoman tried to downplay the severity of his situation, calling it a “cherry-picked case” in a statement to NPR, while arguing that “an exchange model is significantly healthier than a sportsbook model.”
More on gambling addiction: DraftKings Is Using AI to Identify Problem Gamblers and Get Them Hooked