Gambling Addiction Group in Shambles After It Turns Out It's Funded by Kalshi—Futurism, on how the National Council on Problem Gambling f%$#ed itself.
This is unbelievably stupid.
Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide sports betting ban in 2018, gambling has taken off in the United States. Enabled by popular apps, the practice has become a common fixture in daily life amid an inescapable barrage of advertisements urging users to start gambling away their hard-earned cash.
The rise of prediction platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to bet on the outcomes of practically any type of event, has accelerated the trend even further, triggering what experts are warning is a massive increase in gambling addiction.
And now, it turns out that even the National Council on Problem Gambling, the largest nonprofit in the US designed to address gambling addiction, quietly struck a deal to accept donations from Kalshi — a revelation that’s thrown the group into chaos, as Barron’s reports.
An April board meeting about a major donation required attendees to sign a non-disclosure agreement, setting a concerning precedent for the nonprofit. At the meeting, NCPG executive director Heather Maurer, who had assumed her role just three months prior, announced that Kalshi was poised to donate $2 million — the second largest donation in the nonprofit’s history.
Understandably, the news that one of the biggest suspected contributors to gambling addiction was looking to fund a nonprofit that’s trying to address the problem was met with plenty of skepticism. The deal, which Maurer had finalized behind the board’s back, “landed like a bombshell in the gambling addiction advocacy community,” per Barron’s.
Taking a donation from a prediction market is like a “national council on teenage sex abuse taking money from Jeffrey Epstein,” longtime NCPG member Marc Lefkowitz told the publication.
(emphasis mine)
To quote not Tallyrand, "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake."
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