The American Gaming Association, a casino trade group, wants the feds to crack down on the sports prediction markets hosted on such platforms as Kalshi and Polymarket. So does the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency: In April 2025, according to public records obtained by WBFF-TV's Spotlight on Maryland unit, it sent a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission demanding just that. The letter was an almost word-for-word match with a letter drafted earlier by the casino lobby.
"As the regulatory bodies charged with licensing and overseeing the legal gaming industry in our states," the association's model letter began, "we write today to express our grave concerns regarding the introduction of so-called 'sport event contracts.'" The Maryland letter changed "bodies" to "body" and "in our states" to "in Maryland," but otherwise its sentence was the same. The original letter then accused the platforms of putting "citizens at risk" by avoiding the "carefully crafted statutory and regulatory safeguards developed in each of our states." The Maryland letter said the exact same thing—including that phrase "each of our states." (So much for carefully crafted, state-by-state language.) This went on for three paragraphs, with hardly any differences between the texts.
