Comment Text:
I am an auto mechanic from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I have worked in the same shop for sixteen years. I am not a lawyer or a financial expert, and I have never submitted a public comment to a federal agency before. I am doing it now because my 22-year-old son lost $8,000 on Kalshi in four months — money he saved doing summer work through high school and college — and because when I looked into what Kalshi actually is, I became furious that the federal government allows it to operate.
What This Looks Like From Where I Sit
My son is a smart kid. He found Kalshi through YouTube. The pitch was that this was different from gambling — this was using your knowledge of current events to make informed predictions. He genuinely believed he was doing something sophisticated. He was not. He was placing binary bets on political outcomes with no consumer protections whatsoever, on a platform designed to keep him depositing.
By the time I found out, he had transferred money in small increments across weeks — the kind of pattern that is hard to notice until it is too late. He was not sleeping. His grades dropped. He did not want to talk to anyone. That is what Kalshi's product did to my kid.
I fix cars for a living. I understand what it means when something is not built right. Kalshi is not built right. It is built to take money from young people who do not fully understand what they are participating in, with none of the safeguards that any honest regulator would require.
This Is Not a Commodity Exchange. It Is a Predatory Gambling App.
I looked up what Kalshi actually offers. Contracts on whether a specific politician gets indicted. Whether inflation hits a certain number. Whether a celebrity wins an award. My son was not hedging a commercial risk. He had no underlying financial exposure to any of these outcomes. He was gambling — and any honest person looking at this product knows that is exactly what it is.
What I cannot understand is why a company offering a product identical to a sports betting app gets to skip every consumer protection that sports betting operators are required to provide. In Pennsylvania, where we live, licensed gambling operators must enforce deposit limits, fund addiction treatment, maintain self-exclusion lists, and restrict advertising to young audiences. These laws exist because our state legislature decided that if gambling is going to be legal, operators have to share responsibility for the damage it causes.
Kalshi has none of these obligations because it convinced the CFTC it is a commodity exchange. That legal sleight of hand has real consequences for real families. Mine is one of them.
What I Am Asking the Commission to Do
I do not have a law degree. I cannot cite statutes. But I can tell you that what Kalshi is doing is wrong, that the Commission has the authority to stop it, and that the people being hurt are overwhelmingly young people from working families who can least afford to absorb these losses.
Shut Kalshi down. Require any platform like it to follow the same rules as every other gambling operator in this country. Stop letting a company hide behind a federal registration to prey on kids.
I have spent sixteen years fixing things that are broken. This is broken. Fix it.
