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Utah files 14 criminal counts against Kalshi, names Mansour and Lopes Lara

Utah charged KalshiEX LLC and both co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara with one felony pattern of unlawful activity, twelve counts of promoting online gambling and one misdemeanor.

by 4 min read
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Utah's Attorney General filed 14 criminal charges against prediction-market operator KalshiEX LLC and both co-founders on October 28, escalating a state-versus-platform fight that had, until then, run as a civil complaint. The named defendants are Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara.

What was filed

The charges, filed in Utah on October 28, break down as:

  • 1 count — pattern of unlawful activity (felony). Utah's RICO-style charge for repeated statutory violations.
  • 12 counts — promoting online gambling. One count for each wager an Attorney General's Office undercover agent placed on Kalshi from a Utah address, phone number and debit card.
  • 1 count — misdemeanor gambling.

An undercover agent placed 12 distinct sports contracts on Kalshi while physically located in Utah; the state cites those transactions as the evidentiary spine of the complaint. Kalshi had not responded to the filing at CoinDesk's publication time.

Where this sits in the fight

This is the second escalation of a state offensive against the platform's sports contracts, and the first time a state has pulled in Mansour and Lopes Lara by name:

  • Arizona (March 2026): 20 misdemeanor counts filed by AG Kris Mayes in Maricopa County, with fines capped at $10,000–$20,000 per count. Entities only.
  • Utah (October 20, 2026): verified civil complaint by AG Derek Brown in Salt Lake County's Third District Court. 63 pages. Named Kalshi and two Susquehanna trading firms. Sought a geolocation-enforced ban and disgorgement of profits estimated at $30.6M–$61.2M.
  • Utah (October 28, 2026): 14 criminal counts, including the first felony count on record in the state-versus-prediction-markets fight, and the first named-officer charges.

Kalshi's standing argument is that its sports contracts are federally regulated event contracts under the Commodity Exchange Act, placing them inside the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's exclusive jurisdiction and outside state gambling law. The CFTC sued Utah to enforce that position before the October 20 civil filing. The criminal escalation is Utah's bet that the preemption argument will not block state prosecutors.

What to watch

  1. Kalshi's response — a formal statement is overdue, and the shape of it (preemption motion, removal to federal court, political push) sets the next 30 days.
  2. The Arizona docket. Mayes's charges are misdemeanors; Utah's include a felony. If Utah's pattern-of-unlawful-activity count survives a motion to dismiss, other states may copy the structure.
  3. The CFTC's parallel suit against Utah. The federal court's view on preemption is now the single highest-weight input into whether the Utah criminal case can proceed on the merits.
  4. Whether any charges are brought against Susquehanna-affiliated firms. The civil complaint named them; the criminal filing names only Kalshi entities and the two co-founders.

Context

Twelve different states — Nevada, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Montana among them — have cease-and-desist orders or active litigation against Kalshi over sports contracts since early 2026. Utah is the fifth state to move past administrative action, and the first to name individual officers. The CFTC's suit against Utah, filed earlier in October, pushes the preemption question into federal court; the criminal charges push it into a state court on the merits. Whichever reaches a dispositive ruling first will set the national framework.

The platform's defenders argue that targeting founders is a message to the market, not a trial strategy, and that the preemption question is why Kalshi has been pouring budget into federal litigation rather than state settlements. The states' answer, visible in the Utah filing, is to treat the CFTC's silence on election and sports contracts as evidence that no federal regime displaces state gambling law. The Utah misdemeanor and felony counts give that argument its first courtroom test with a named-defendant trial on the table.

Sources

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