Florida Sues Stake, VGW and Four Payment Processors Over Sweepstakes

Attorney General James Uthmeier has gone after the operators and the payment rails in the same action, naming Worldpay, Trustly, Praxis and Breeze Labs alongside Stake and VGW. Suing the processors is the part the rest of the industry should be reading.

• Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed complaints on Wednesday 19 August in Hillsborough County Circuit Court against sweepstakes operators Stake and VGW
• Payment processors Worldpay, Trustly, Praxis and Breeze Labs were named as defendants alongside them
• VGW operates Chumba Casino, LuckyLand and Global Poker, among other brands
• The complaints allege the dual-currency model disguises real-money gambling, and cite Florida's gambling statutes alongside its Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act
• The state is seeking permanent injunctions, disgorgement of alleged ill-gotten gains, consumer restitution, civil penalties and attorneys' fees

The Complaint Reaches Past the Operators

Florida has filed suit against two of the largest names in sweepstakes gaming, and against the companies that move the money.

Attorney General James Uthmeier announced complaints on Wednesday 19 August in Hillsborough County Circuit Court naming Stake and VGW, the operator of Chumba Casino, LuckyLand and Global Poker. Named alongside them are the payment processors Worldpay, Trustly, Praxis and Breeze Labs. Casino.org additionally reported that Stake co-founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani are named as individual defendants.

The state's argument is that the dual-currency model is a legal fiction. Players buy packages of Gold Coins, which carry no cash value, and receive a second currency, Sweeps Coins or Stake Cash, presented as a free bonus. That second currency can be redeemed for cash, cryptocurrency or gift cards after limited play-through. Operators have long maintained the structure keeps them lawful because the redeemable currency is given away rather than sold.

Uthmeier's characterisation was less technical. "If it looks, swims, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck," he said, and described sweepstakes casinos as a gateway to illegal gambling.

Florida permits slot machines only in narrow circumstances at licensed facilities. The complaints allege the defendants operate and facilitate illegal online casinos in the state, and cite Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act alongside its gambling statutes.

The remedies sought are broad: permanent injunctions, recovery of what the attorney general's office described as every dollar lost by Florida residents, disgorgement, civil penalties and attorneys' fees.

No response from Stake, VGW or any of the named processors had been reported at the time of writing, and none of the allegations has been tested in court.

Florida Joins a Crowded Field, With a Different Method

The sweepstakes model has been under sustained attack. Since 2025, states including California, Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Tennessee have enacted laws targeting it, while Michigan and Washington have used existing gambling law to push operators out.

What distinguishes Florida's action is not the theory of the case but its reach. Most previous efforts have been directed at operators, either through new legislation or cease-and-desist letters. Naming four payment processors as defendants in the same complaint is a materially different approach.

Suing the Payment Rails Is the Enforcement Pattern of 2026

This is the third significant action this month aimed at infrastructure rather than platforms. Denmark's regulator took a telecoms company to court to block Polymarket, reaching the network layer because it could not practically reach the operator. Denmark's financial regulator separately barred the payments firm Inpay from taking on new online gaming clients. Now Florida has named four processors as defendants in a gambling case. The logic is the same in each: an offshore or offshore-adjacent operator is hard to compel, but the companies that connect it to customers are regulated, jurisdictionally reachable and have far more to lose. Any processor serving this vertical should assume its risk profile has changed, because the question is no longer whether the merchant is licensed but whether a state attorney general thinks the merchant is running an illegal casino.

The Dual-Currency Defence Is Being Tested Where It Is Weakest

Sweepstakes operators have generally prevailed on the argument that a free-entry sweepstake is not gambling, and that argument has more force in states with permissive promotional law than in states with restrictive gaming codes. Florida is firmly in the second category, permitting slots only in narrow circumstances at licensed facilities, which gives the state a straightforward comparison to draw. Pairing the gambling claim with a Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act count is the sharper move, because it shifts the question from whether the product is technically a sweepstake to whether consumers understood what they were buying. That is a harder case for an operator to win on the structure of its currency alone.

Every Dollar Lost by Florida Residents Is a Number Nobody Has Published

The remedy sought is the part with the largest commercial consequence, and the one with no public figure attached. Sweepstakes operators do not report state-level revenue, and neither VGW nor Stake discloses Florida-specific player losses. If the state succeeds on disgorgement, the sum will be established through discovery rather than from any published account, and it will be the first authoritative measure of what the sweepstakes model actually takes out of a single large US state. That number, whenever it appears, will matter well beyond this case: it is the figure every other attorney general weighing a similar action currently lacks.

Florida has not broken new legal ground on what a sweepstake is. It has widened the list of people who have to answer for it.