At a glance

  • Utah’s attorney general has charged KalshiEX LLC with 14 gambling-related counts in state court in Salt Lake City, and named chief executive Tarek Mansour and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara as co-defendants, according to the charging document.
  • The case rests on 12 sports bets an undercover state agent says he placed on Kalshi in September. Kalshi called the charges “a crazy overreach” and said it would fight them in court.

The filing is a criminal information, the document a prosecutor uses to bring charges without a grand jury. It is dated 28 Oct and was filed in Salt Lake City, in the Third District Court. The charges are allegations, and the company and both executives are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

It comes nine days after Utah’s civil suit against Kalshi and two Susquehanna firms, and two days after the CFTC and Justice Department sued Utah to stop the state’s enforcement.

What the charging document says

Count 1 alleges a pattern of unlawful activity, a second-degree felony. That is Utah’s racketeering-style offence: it targets proceeds from repeated crimes that are put back into a business.

Counts 2 to 13 allege online gambling promotion, each a third-degree felony, one for every bet. Count 14 alleges general gambling promotion, a Class A misdemeanor.

According to a sworn declaration by Special Agent Scott Eggerman, he opened an account on 13 Sep 2026 under an assumed name, after checking that his location showed as Utah. Between 13 and 26 Sep he says he placed 12 wagers from Salt Lake and Davis counties, on NFL, college football, MLS, MLB and NHL games.

The first, by his account, was a $10 bet that the Dallas Cowboys would beat the New York Giants, with a fee of $0.44. The fees listed in the declaration run from 3 cents to 78 cents per bet, or $3.36 in total by this desk’s count.

The counts are written against the company. The declaration says Mansour and Lopes Lara, as co-founders, took part in running the business “through a pattern of unlawful activity”.

What Utah says

The document recounts the earlier federal case. Kalshi sued Utah’s governor on 23 Feb 2026, and on 4 Aug Judge Robert Shelby ruled that federal commodities law does not preempt Utah’s gambling laws. The Tenth Circuit declined on 8 Sep to pause that ruling while Kalshi appeals.

According to the declaration, Kalshi and the two executives kept offering the bets after those rulings. “Calling it a ‘prediction market’ doesn’t change what it is,” Attorney General Derek Brown said in a statement, as reported by the Deseret News.

What Kalshi says

“This is a crazy overreach; Utah is clearly playing politics,” a Kalshi spokesperson said, according to the Deseret News. The company said it expects to stop the case in court, “just like we did in Arizona”.

Kalshi’s position, backed by the CFTC, is that its event contracts are regulated swaps on a federally licensed exchange. Leagues have also weighed in on the wider fight, as in the NFL’s amicus brief against Kalshi.

What happens next

The information was filed with a summons, so the defendants are asked to appear rather than being arrested. No first court date was public by 12:45 UTC on 29 Oct. The federal suit against Utah, filed on 26 Oct, could still lead a federal judge to pause the state’s case.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.