- Attorney General James Uthmeier filed two complaints Aug. 19 in Hillsborough County Circuit Court over unlicensed online casinos.
- Worldpay, Trustly, Yodlee, Praxis Tech and Breeze Labs face the money-forfeiture count but not the deceptive-practices count.
- The VGW complaint puts the company’s 2025 revenue above $5 billion, with $3.7 billion attributed to Chumba Casino.
- Both suits seek permanent injunctions and civil penalties of up to $10,000 per willful violation, or $15,000 for players over 60.
TAMPA, Fla. – Florida sued the operators of Stake.us and VGW’s Chumba Casino, LuckyLand Slots, LuckyLand Casino and Global Poker on Aug. 19 and named five payment companies as co-defendants jointly liable for what Floridians lost on the sweepstakes casinos.
The Processors Are On The Forfeiture Count, Not The Deception Count
Count I, the money-forfeiture claim, runs against every defendant, payment firms included. Count II, the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act claim, runs against the VGW companies in one case and, in the other, against Stake.us, Easygo Group Holdings, the Kick streaming company and co-founders Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani.
Count I invokes Florida’s gambling loss recovery statute, Section 849.12, together with Section 849.29, which extends joint and several liability past the winner of the money to anyone who “promotes, sets up or conducts the gambling transaction in which the loss occurs or has an interest in it as backer, vendor, owner or otherwise.” Uthmeier’s theory is that the money plumbing sits inside that definition.
The VGW complaint assigns each processor a specific function. Yodlee links players’ bank accounts and verifies ownership and available funds, Trustly executes the transfers through those connections, and Worldpay authorizes, routes, clears and settles the electronic payments. The filing dates Worldpay’s relationship with Chumba Casino to a partnership announced in June 2018 and points to a Chumba privacy policy updated July 13, 2026, that still lists Worldpay as a payment provider.
The Stake complaint names two firms. Praxis Tech, which the filing calls a payment orchestration platform for the iGaming industry, partnered with Stake in November 2025. Breeze Labs Payments is the merchant of record handling credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cryptocurrency and the chargeback and dispute process behind them, the complaint says.
Both complaints allege the processors knew or were willfully blind to the operators’ cease-and-desist letters, enforcement actions elsewhere and withdrawals from multiple jurisdictions. That allegation carries the state’s sophisticated-party argument. Trustly, the VGW filing notes, also serves licensed operators including BetMGM, DraftKings, PointsBet and Caesars Sportsbook, which is how Florida gets to treating a payments vendor as a participant in an unlicensed enterprise.
What Florida Says The Dual-Currency Model Is
Players buy packages of Gold Coins that arrive bundled with Sweeps Coins or Stake Cash, both complaints say. Those second-currency credits can be cashed out for money or gift cards on a 1:1 or near 1:1 basis, and that redemption path is what the state says makes the sweepstakes casinos gambling. The Stake filing adds cryptocurrency to the cash-out options and says Stake Cash unlocks after being wagered three times.
That structure satisfies Florida’s slot machine definitions at Sections 849.15(1) and 849.16(1)(a), the complaints argue, because a device activated by “any piece of money, coin, account number, code, or other object or information” that returns something exchangeable for money is a slot machine. Section 849.16(3) adds a rebuttable presumption to the same effect for any system displaying games of chance as part of a scheme involving payment and an award of value.
The VGW filing also calls the cash-out threshold itself unconscionable, on the theory that a player who has not won enough Sweeps Coins to redeem has to keep gambling to reach the line. Its opening paragraph rejects the sweepstakes label outright, saying the operators use the term “as if that’s some sort of talismanic cure-all” and that a thing that looks, swims and quacks like a duck is a duck.
The Revenue Figures In The Filings
The VGW complaint states the group generated more than $5 billion in revenue in 2025 alone, of which $3.7 billion came from Chumba Casino, and notes founder Laurence Escalante took the companies private that year. The numbers are in the filings because the state is seeking disgorgement.
The Stake filing cites company accounts reviewed by the Financial Times showing gross gaming revenue climbing from roughly $105 million in 2020 to nearly $2.6 billion in 2022, and a Forbes profile of co-founder Ed Craven putting 2024 gross gaming revenue near $4.7 billion. It also alleges Kick, the livestreaming platform Craven and Bijan Tehrani launched after Twitch barred Stake-related gambling content, functions as a continuous advertisement for the casino.
What Florida Is Asking The Court To Order
Neither complaint fixes a Florida-specific figure. The forfeiture sought is all money at stake, used or won in connection with gambling by people in Florida, an amount the court would have to determine, and both suits ask for permanent injunctions on top of it.
Florida seeks up to $10,000 per willful FDUTPA violation and up to $15,000 per willful violation involving a consumer over 60 or one with a mental or psychological disorder or a disability. The VGW complaint notes that gambling addiction is a recognized diagnosable disorder in Florida, which widens the pool of players the higher tier could cover.
No Licensed Online Casino Sits Behind The Claim
Florida authorizes slot machine gaming only at licensed pari-mutuel facilities in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, the Stake complaint notes, citing Section 551.101. No legal online casino competes with the defendants. That separates the case from enforcement in states where licensed operators lose business to unlicensed ones, and it leaves Floridians choosing among sweepstakes sites and offshore USA gambling sites. The injury the state alleges is the licensing, taxation and other revenue it never collected, plus the consumer harm.
The sites remain reachable in Florida while the case proceeds, a different footing from Indiana bans sweepstakes casinos, where a statute set a hard cutoff date and a cash-out window.
The clerk stamped the two complaints at 8:52 a.m. and 8:54 a.m. on Aug. 19, and both demand trial by jury.