Kalshi falls outside Pennsylvania’s self-exclusion system, NPR profile finds

A Pennsylvania man who had barred himself from sportsbooks after bankruptcy later lost more than $25,000 trading on Kalshi, highlighting that the state’s gambling self-exclusion system does not automatically extend to prediction-market platforms.

NPR identified the 35-year-old only by his middle name, Thomas. He began betting during the pandemic, mainly on football and tennis parlays through DraftKings and FanDuel, eventually losing more than $50,000 on online sportsbooks and building about $75,000 in credit-card and personal-loan debt.

Thomas filed for bankruptcy in late 2023 and settled with most creditors. He then self-excluded from DraftKings and FanDuel, but about two years later saw an Instagram promotion from Kalshi that offered a $20 bonus for spending an initial $10.

That small first trade grew into bets of hundreds of dollars, then thousands. Thomas’s records showed he could spend up to 18 hours a day trading, illustrating the frequency possible on short-duration markets that can restart every 15 minutes.

Pennsylvania’s program allows people to voluntarily ban themselves from casinos, internet-based gambling, video gaming terminals and fantasy-sports wagering. It covers mobile sports betting and other regulated online gambling, and blocks direct marketing from betting operators, but it does not automatically include prediction-market sites such as Kalshi. More than 30,000 state residents were enrolled in the program, NPR reported, citing state records.

The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board has previously described sports prediction markets as a parallel system outside the state’s established gambling framework. In April 2025 testimony to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the board said operators treating their products as federally supervised derivatives or swaps may avoid the state licensing, tax, consumer-protection, responsible-gaming and integrity-monitoring rules imposed on regulated gambling companies. Those state-regulated systems include self-exclusion integration, it said.

Kalshi is federally supervised as a provider of financial contracts rather than licensed by states as a gambling business. The company says it offers break prompts, deposit limits, voluntary self-exclusion and connections to mental-health counseling services; it also participates in an industry self-exclusion program used by Polymarket and other prediction markets.

When Thomas asked Kalshi to close his account, citing gambling addiction and his earlier self-exclusion, an automated response offered a trading break, voluntary opt-out or personalised funding cap. He made three further requests for permanent closure before Kalshi barred him.

Kalshi spokeswoman Dani Lever called the case “a cherry-picked case” and said the exchange model did not carry the same incentives as a sportsbook because its profits were not tied to trader losses. The company has said that joining state exclusion databases would require it to obtain state gambling licences and pay high state taxes.

Problem-gambling professionals described a broader concern. Abdullah Mahmood, a counsellor at Maryhaven in Columbus, Ohio, said some clients who had self-excluded from sportsbooks then moved to prediction markets. Jesse Suh, a Philadelphia clinical psychologist, said the platforms presented few barriers to mobile gambling, while responsible-gambling advocate Brian Pempus said users should not have to repeat exclusion requests on platforms that may not honour them.

The issue is emerging as Kalshi’s activity expands rapidly. Sports contracts account for about 80% of its total volume, while crypto-related markets are its second-largest category, according to TickerTracker. In the month cited by NPR, users wagered nearly $60 billion on Kalshi, up from $2.8 billion in the previous September, a year-on-year increase of more than 2,000%.

States are contesting the federal framework that governs prediction markets, a dispute that NPR said could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.