Sweepstakes Casinos: Which States Banned Them, and What Happens to Your Money
Chumba, Stake.us, Pulsz, McLuck, High 5, WOW Vegas, Crown Coins. Tens of millions of Americans play at these sites, and almost all of them assume somebody is regulating them. Nobody is. A sweepstakes casino holds no gambling licence from any authority on earth — not by evasion, but by design, because the entire model exists to sit outside gambling law. This guide explains what that actually costs you, and gives you the current state-by-state legal picture, checked against the legislative record rather than copied from other lists.
01 What a sweepstakes casino actually is
The model is borrowed from prize promotions, not from casinos. It rests on three pieces:
- Two currencies. You buy or receive a play-money currency (Gold Coins, and similar), and each purchase comes bundled with a second promotional currency (Sweeps Coins, Sweepstakes Coins) that can be redeemed for cash or prizes. Legally, you are never buying the thing with the prize value — it is always given to you.
- A free entry route. "No Purchase Necessary" is not marketing decoration; it is the load-bearing element. There is always a way to obtain the promotional currency without paying, usually a mail-in request or a daily bonus. That free route is what keeps the model out of the legal definition of a wager in most states.
- No wager, therefore no gambling. Classic gambling requires consideration, chance and prize. Remove the consideration and, on the traditional analysis, it is a sweepstakes rather than gambling — which means no gaming licence is needed.
Whether that analysis still holds is exactly what US legislatures spent 2025 and 2026 arguing about. The states that acted concluded that a site with slot reels, a redemption balance and a purchase button is functionally a casino regardless of how the coins are labelled, and they wrote new statutes that name the dual-currency structure directly.
02 Where the law now stands, state by state
Twelve states have passed statutes aimed at online sweepstakes gaming. The table below gives the bill, what it does, and when it bites. We checked each entry against the state's own legislative record where that record was reachable; entries we could only confirm through secondary reporting are marked, because a state's website blocking us is not the same as a fact being verified.
| State | Instrument | Effect | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Montana | SB 555 (2025) | First state to act. Effective 1 Oct 2025. | Secondary |
| Connecticut | SB 1235 → Public Act 25-112 | Signed by the Governor 24 Jun 2025; bans dual-currency sweepstakes platforms. | Statute |
| Nevada | SB 256 (2025) | Expanded unlicensed-gambling enforcement, effective 1 Oct 2025. | Secondary |
| New York | S5935A → Chapter 605 of 2025 | Signed 5 Dec 2025. Bans operating, conducting or promoting online sweepstakes games; reaches payment processors and platform providers. | Statute |
| California | AB 831 → Chapter 623 of 2025 | New Penal Code s.337o. Unlawful to operate, conduct or offer an online sweepstakes game. Effective 1 Jan 2026. | Statute |
| Indiana | HB 1052 (2026) | Prohibits internet sweepstakes games using a dual- or multi-currency system. Effective 1 Jul 2026. | Secondary |
| Iowa | SF 2289 (2026) | Narrower than usually reported: it adds "illegal sweepstakes" to the Racing and Gaming Commission's cease-and-desist and injunction powers. It is an enforcement-authority bill, not a dual-currency ban. | Statute |
| Maine | LD 2007 → Chapter 645 | "An Act Regarding the Prohibition of Online Sweepstakes Games." Enacted and signed 6 Apr 2026. | Statute |
| Louisiana | HB 883 → Act 182; HB 53 → Act 48 | Act 182 targets enforcement of illegal online gambling. Act 48 makes certain gambling crimes predicate offences for racketeering. Both effective 1 Aug 2026. | Statute |
| Tennessee | SB 2136 / HB 1885 → Public Chapter 1117 | Signed 27 May 2026. Operating or commercially promoting online sweepstakes games is a violation of the Consumer Protection Act, with expanded Attorney General investigative powers. | Statute |
| Oklahoma | SB 1589 (2026) | Vetoed 7 May 2026, veto overridden (Senate 34-10, House 68-19) and filed with the Secretary of State 14 May 2026. Effective 1 Nov 2026. | Statute |
| New Jersey | A5447 → P.L. 2026, c.128 | Signed 3 Aug 2026. Bans dual-currency sweepstakes; enforcement by the Division of Gaming Enforcement and Division of Consumer Affairs. | Secondary |
Separately, several states — Michigan, Washington and Idaho among them — have pushed operators out using pre-existing gambling law and regulator cease-and-desist letters rather than new statutes. The absence of a state from the table above therefore does not mean the model is safe there; it means no new law names it yet.
03 The part that actually matters: what recourse do you have?
Legality is the question everyone asks. Recourse is the question that decides what happens to your balance, and it has a shorter answer.
When a state-licensed casino refuses to pay you, there is an agency whose job is to make them. In New Jersey you file with the Division of Gaming Enforcement; in Pennsylvania with the Gaming Control Board; in Ontario with the AGCO. That regulator holds something the operator cares about — its licence — and it can order payment. This is the entire practical value of the word "licensed".
When a sweepstakes casino declines your redemption, there is no such agency, because none of them licensed the operator. What you have left is the general consumer toolkit:
- The operator's own support and internal appeal — the only route with any real chance of a fast result.
- A payment dispute or chargeback through your card issuer or payment provider.
- Your state Attorney General or consumer-protection office, and the FTC. These are real, but they are general-purpose complaint routes with no gambling-specific leverage and no timeline.
Note also that sweepstakes terms of service almost universally require individual arbitration and waive class actions, and reserve the right to close accounts and void balances for terms violations that the operator itself defines and adjudicates. You are not dealing with a regulated dispute process; you are dealing with a counterparty and its own contract.
04 What our own data says: the best reviews, the least protection
BetScan scores 433 casinos from licence registers plus independent public review data. When we group them by licence category, the sweepstakes brands produce the most counterintuitive result in the whole database.
| Licence category | Operators | Avg Trustpilot | Avg Trust Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweepstakes / social (no licence) | 16 | 4.13 | 38.6 |
| Curaçao | 97 | 3.09 | 62.3 |
| Anjouan / Comoros / Costa Rica | 23 | 2.61 | 8.6 |
| Malta / Gibraltar / Isle of Man | 52 | 2.42 | 67.7 |
| National regulators (US states, UK, Italy, Ontario) | 88 | 2.35 | 84.2 |
Sweepstakes casinos have the highest average Trustpilot rating of any category we track, at 4.13 — and nationally licensed operators have the lowest, at 2.35. The relationship between public rating and regulatory protection is not weak. It is inverted.
That is not evidence that sweepstakes sites are safer. It is evidence that a review score and a licence measure different things. Most people at a sweepstakes casino are playing a free-to-play game and rating a pleasant experience. Most people who bother to review a licensed gambling operator are doing it because a withdrawal was delayed or an account was locked during verification. One number describes an average day; the other describes your worst one.
This is precisely why BetScan does not let review data override licence data. Under our scoring, the sweepstakes tier cannot exceed 58 out of 100 no matter how good its reviews get, because good reviews cannot manufacture a regulator that does not exist.
See what a site is before you deposit
BetScan checks the licence claim against the regulator's public register on every casino site you open, and tells you when there is no register to check.
Add BetScan to Chrome — Free05 A mistake we made, and what it should teach you
While researching this guide we audited our own scores for the category and found our licence detection had been inventing regulators. Two examples, both live on this site until 1 September 2026:
Corrected: they now score 43 and 48, in a sweepstakes tier that cannot reach "Verified". The underlying cause — an automated licence lookup that preferred a plausible-sounding answer over admitting it had found nothing — has been fixed at the source.
We are documenting this rather than quietly patching it because the failure mode is the one you should watch for everywhere in this niche. A system asked "who licenses this site?" will, unless it is specifically built not to, produce a name. The name looks like verification. It is not. The only thing that verifies a licence is finding the operator in the regulator's own public register — and for a sweepstakes casino, there is no register to find them in, which is the answer.
06 How to check your own situation in two minutes
- Confirm what the site is. Look for "No Purchase Necessary", a two-coin balance, or "social casino" in the footer or terms. Any of those means sweepstakes, which means no licence and no regulator, whatever else the page claims.
- Check your state against the table above, and against the operator's own terms — the excluded-state list is in the terms, and it is the operator's decision, updated on its own schedule, not a legal register.
- If your state has a date coming, redeem your balance before it. Do not assume you will be given notice.
- If you want a licensed alternative, check whether your state has one. Only a handful of US states license real online casinos. Our US and Canada regulator directory lists every official register, so you can confirm an operator is on the state's own authorised list rather than taking its word.
How we verified this guide
State-law entries marked "Statute" were read from the state's own legislative record: California via leginfo, New York via the Senate bill page, Connecticut via the CGA bill-status record, Tennessee via capitol.tn.gov, Oklahoma via oklegislature.gov, Louisiana via legis.la.gov, Maine via legislature.maine.gov, and Iowa from the enrolled bill text. Entries marked "Secondary" (Montana, Nevada, Indiana, New Jersey) come from consistent secondary reporting — those states' sites blocked our automated requests, so we could not read the record directly and have labelled that rather than implying a check we did not perform. Operator classification was made from each site's own pages, never inferred from a brand name. Score and review figures are from the BetScan database as of 1 September 2026 and will drift as operators are rescanned. None of this is legal advice; gambling law is state-specific and changing quickly.
Frequently asked questions
It depends entirely on your state, and the picture changed a lot in 2025 and 2026. At least twelve states have now passed statutes that specifically target dual-currency online sweepstakes games, including California, New York, Connecticut, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, Indiana, Maine, Louisiana, Tennessee and Oklahoma. In the remaining states the model is either tolerated or sits in an untested grey area under general gambling law. The laws almost always target the operator rather than the player.
No, and that is the defining feature of the model rather than an oversight. A sweepstakes casino operates under promotional-sweepstakes law, the same body of law behind a soft-drink bottle-cap giveaway. There is no gaming regulator, no licence number, no public register, and no gambling-specific complaints body. If a site of this type displays a state regulator's name, treat that as a serious red flag — those agencies do not license this model.
You have no gaming regulator to escalate to, because none licensed the operator. Your realistic options are the company's own support process, a chargeback or payment-provider dispute, your state Attorney General or consumer-protection office, and the FTC. All of these are general consumer routes with no gambling-specific leverage, and most sweepstakes terms require individual arbitration and waive class actions. This is the single biggest practical difference from a state-licensed casino, where the regulator can order the operator to pay.
Across BetScan's database the sweepstakes brands average 4.13 on Trustpilot — the highest of any licence category we track, and well above nationally licensed operators at 2.35. The explanation is that a public rating measures day-to-day customer experience among people who mostly play for free, while a licence measures what happens on your worst day. They are different things, and a high review score does not create a regulator.
The state bans passed so far are written against operators, suppliers, payment processors and affiliates rather than players, and we are not aware of a player being prosecuted for playing. The practical consequence for you is different: once a state bans the model, operators withdraw, and you need to be able to get your balance out before your account is closed.
Independence: BetScan is a free browser extension. It carries no operator links, bonus offers or sign-up promotions, and has no commercial relationship with any operator it rates. Every score is calculated from license registries and independent public reviews only.