Utah attorney general received campaign donations from gambling companies, disclosures show
by Cassidy Wixom ksl · KSL.comKEY TAKEAWAYS
- Utah AG Derek Brown's campaign received $80,000 from gambling companies, according to financial disclosures.
- The campaign donors included competitors of Kalshi, a company with which Brown is in an ongoing legal battle.
- Prediction market Kalshi challenges Utah's gambling laws, saying it is federally regulated and legal.
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Attorney General Derek Brown has been cracking down on online gambling in recent months, but according to financial disclosures, his campaign received at least $80,000 from the gambling industry.
The campaign donations have come under scrutiny after Brown has publicly gone after Kalshi, a "prediction market" that operates through a federally regulated financial exchange under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's oversight. The platform is commonly associated with sports betting and wagers on real-world events.
Utah's constitution prohibits gambling, but as online platforms that offer bets and wagers on sports and real-world events become increasingly popular across the country, the question is being raised in courts of whether these so-called "prediction markets" legally constitute gambling.
According to financial campaign disclosures from 2025 and 2026, Brown received donations from two direct competitors of Kalshi, a top official from a third competitor, two sweepstakes casino companies and a Las Vegas casino.
Brown's campaign received two payments in 2025 of $2,500 from Sideprize, LLC, the company that operates the daily fantasy sports platform PrizePicks. In April 2025, his campaign received a $5,000 donation from DK Crown, a subsidiary of digital sports entertainment gambling company DraftKings.
In January, he received a $10,000 donation from Stacie Stern, a senior vice president at Underdog Fantasy Sports, an online daily fantasy sports website.
Brown also received a total of $10,000 from Arb Gaming LLC and VGW LuckyLand Inc. this year — two companies that operate as online sweepstakes casinos where users can win prizes, including real cash, for online casino-style games.
In April, after Brown publicly announced his intentions to crack down on online gambling platforms, he received a whopping $50,000 donation from Las Vegas Sands Corporation. One of the world's largest casino companies, Las Vegas Sands has a history of lobbying against online gambling.
Brown's campaign advisor Matt Lusty said in a statement that the attorney general receives many donations to his campaign each year.
"These donations have no influence on his decision-making. He remains focused on going after the companies and individuals that harm Utahns," Lusty said.
Can prediction markets operate legally in Utah?
Brown first publicly announced his intentions to crack down on online gambling in an editorial published on the Deseret News in February.
Kalshi subsequently filed a federal complaint against Gov. Spencer Cox, and Brown stated that the company believed the state would "imminently bring an enforcement action against Kalshi with the intent to prevent Kalshi from offering event contracts for trading on its federally regulated exchange."
In August, a judgment was entered in favor of the state upholding its gambling laws against Kalshi, but Kalshi has since appealed that decision. The case is now ongoing in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
But last week, Brown filed a civil complaint in Utah's 3rd District Court, asking for all Kalshi enterprises to stop their "illegal conduct" of operating sports betting in Utah and compensate the state for alleged harm done to its citizens.
"Kalshi runs an online casino in Utah and calls it a prediction market. That violates Utah law," Brown said in a statement last week. "For 130 years, Utah has been clear: gambling has no place here, and we will enforce our laws."
Kalshi claims that its operations are not sports betting, but are event contracts operating under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's oversight.
The federal government and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission agree with Kalshi, responding to Brown's suit in a federal complaint filed Monday claiming Utah has no authority to ban "derivatives markets governed by federal law."
"Commodity Exchange Act-regulated transactions are not gambling," the suit states. "The commission's exclusive jurisdiction precludes Utah from regulating or prohibiting them."
On Wednesday, the attorney general's office filed criminal information charging KalshiEx, LLC, with a pattern of unlawful activity, a second-degree felony; 12 counts of online gambling promotion, a third-degree felony; and a class A misdemeanor of general gambling promotion.
The charges cite 12 different instances in which Kalshi "derived proceeds from multiple episodes of online gambling promotion" for wagers on various sports games, including football and hockey games in Utah.
The attorney general's office claims that, despite the recent court decisions that sided with Utah's gambling laws in the case Kalshi filed against Utah, Kalshi has "continued to provide or offer to provide online gambling to individuals in the State of Utah," the charges state.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.