Enforcement: How hard does the regulator enforce?

Ohio's enforcement posture tightened materially following the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals' 25 September 2026 ruling that Ohio may regulate Kalshi's sports-event contracts as gambling, rejecting the argument that such contracts are Commodity Exchange Act 'swaps' preempting state law. That ruling removed the principal federal-preemption defense available to prediction-market operators. Acting on it, the Ohio Casino Control Commission issued cease-and-desist letters on 3 October 2026 to ten prediction-market operators and brokers, including Kalshi, Robinhood, Crypto.com and Underdog, demanding they cease offering sports-event contracts and provide written confirmation of compliance by 16 October 2026. The campaign follows Governor DeWine's 2 October 2026 enforcement directive. The OCCC's letters reference its prior penalty against Kalshi of five million dollars, imposed in April 2026 for unlicensed sports gaming, as precedent for the scale of consequence non-compliance can carry. No primary text of the cease-and-desist orders has yet been retrieved; the campaign's existence and targets are corroborated across secondary reporting rather than the order documents themselves. The direction of travel is unambiguous: Ohio is actively asserting its gambling statute against unlicensed prediction-market sports-event contracts, a product class it previously could not reach while the federal-preemption argument stood.