Florida just went after the sweepstakes casino industry with both hands.
Attorney General James Uthmeier filed two lawsuits on Wednesday in Hillsborough County Circuit Court, one against Stake and one against Virtual Gaming Worlds, the Australian company behind Chumba Casino, LuckyLand Slots and Global Poker. Neither suit asks for a new law. Both argue the sweepstakes model already breaks the ones Florida has on the books.
“These so-called ‘sweepstakes’ and ‘social casinos‘ are illegal online gambling operations,” Uthmeier said. “If it looks like a casino, takes real money like a casino, and pays out like a casino, it is a casino, and it is illegal under Florida law.”
The complaints go further than most state actions to date. Uthmeier did not stop at the operators. He named the money movers too.
The Payment Processors Got Pulled In
In the VGW case, the AG sued Yodlee, Trustly and Worldpay Holdco alongside seven VGW corporate entities. The complaint lays out their roles in order: Yodlee links a player’s bank account, Trustly moves the funds, Worldpay runs the card transactions.
The Stake filing names four payment firms, Breeze Labs, Praxis, Trustly and Worldpay, and it also names two people. Stake co-founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani are individual defendants, with the state alleging they personally participated in and controlled the company’s marketing and expansion strategy.
That is the part the industry will be reading twice. Suing an offshore operator is one thing. Suing the banks-adjacent middlemen and the founders by name is a different level of pressure, and it gives Florida leverage that a cease-and-desist letter never had.
Uthmeier saved his sharpest language for Stake, accusing the brand of using the idea of safe social gaming and celebrity endorsements to bring consumers into the storefront, “only to then push them out the backdoor, into the dark alley where their illegal, unlicensed real money gambling operations occur.” He has also described these platforms as gateway drugs to real money gambling.
How the State Says the Model Works
The legal theory rests on the dual currency setup that every sweepstakes site uses.
Players buy packages of Gold Coins, which have no cash value on their own. Bundled in free with those purchases are Sweeps Coins, or Stake Cash on Stake’s platform, and those do carry value. Play them through on slots, blackjack or poker, clear a light play-through requirement, and the balance can be redeemed for cash, gift cards or crypto.
The VGW complaint walks through the onboarding: a new user gets 100,000 Gold Coins plus two Sweeps Coins, worth two dollars, redeemable one to one against the U.S. dollar. From there, more Sweeps Coins arrive attached to bundles bought with a credit card, Apple Pay or Skrill. Legal Sports Report noted the filings point to a near one to one correlation between dollars spent and in-game currency received, which is exactly the link the sweepstakes structure is supposed to sever.
The state also flags the platforms’ own disclosures as evidence against them. The complaint quotes VGW explaining return to player mechanics in plain terms, that a slot type with an 8% advantage produces an average RTP of 92%. That is casino math, published on a site that tells visitors it is “100% safe and 100% legal.”
Marketing is the second front. The VGW complaint points to influencer and celebrity promotion, naming Ryan Seacrest and Michael Phelps, and accuses the company of spotlighting big winners while staying quiet about losses. Uthmeier says the companies have been “preying on Floridians, including minors and seniors, with deceptive marketing, and 24/7 access, while dodging our state’s licensing, taxation, and consumer-protection requirements.”
The Statutes and the Ask
Florida is running two counts. The first seeks forfeiture and recovery of money lost gambling under sections 849.12 and 849.29 of the Florida Statutes, aimed at every defendant including the processors. The second alleges violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act under section 501.204, aimed at the operators.
The complaints also lean on the state’s slot machine definitions and on Article X, Section 23 of the Florida Constitution, which confines authorized slot facilities to Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
What the AG wants:
- A permanent injunction shutting the platforms out of Florida
- Disgorgement of profits earned in the state
- Forfeiture of gambling proceeds and restitution for players
- Civil penalties up to $10,000 per willful violation, rising to $15,000 when the consumer was a minor, a senior 60 or older, or a person with a disability
- Attorney fees and costs
Given the size of these businesses, the penalty math is not academic. VGW cleared more than $5 billion in revenue in 2025 by the state’s accounting, with Chumba Casino alone at $3.7 billion. Stake reported $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024. The complaint pegs the wider sweepstakes sector at roughly $10.6 billion gross in 2024 with projections above $14.3 billion for 2025, off a compound annual growth rate of 60% to 70% between 2020 and 2024.
Florida Was Late, Then Went Big
Lawmakers had a shot at this in the spring. House Bill 591, filed by Rep. Berny Jacques, would have tightened the state’s internet gambling ban. It never cleared committee before the session closed in March.
Uthmeier’s answer is that the bill was never necessary. The AG’s position is that existing statute already covers it, and he is now asking a judge to say so.
Florida is not the first mover here, but it may be the most aggressive. Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman sued VGW in June, skipping the cease-and-desist stage and going straight to court. Roughly ten states have passed sweepstakes-specific laws since 2025, including California’s AB 831 and New York’s ban late last year. Illinois sent cease-and-desist orders to more than 60 operators in February. Michigan and Washington pushed operators out using gambling statutes they already had. New Jersey advanced Assembly Bill A5447 to prohibit the model outright.
VGW has not commented on the Florida filing. When Kentucky sued, the company said it respectfully rejected the attorney general’s claims, promised a vigorous defense, and said it had lawfully operated in the United States for more than a decade. Stake, Craven and Tehrani have not responded publicly.
For Florida players, nothing changes today. The platforms remain accessible while the case proceeds, and an injunction is a request, not a ruling. But the state’s legal gambling market runs through the Seminole Tribe compact, which makes the tax and licensing argument in these complaints unusually pointed. Florida is not just claiming these operators broke the law. It is claiming they took revenue that belonged to the state.
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