When the legislature failed to ban them, the attorney general went after their ads instead.

Florida AG expands sweepstakes crackdown to Google, Meta and TikTok ad channels

By iGaming USA editorial desk Published Updated

A modern government building with a glass facade
A government building. Florida's attorney general is now pressuring the ad platforms that carry sweepstakes promotions. Photo: Airam Dato-on / Pexels

The short answer

Florida's attorney general sent letters to Google, Meta, Reddit, Snap and TikTok demanding they stop promoting sweepstakes casinos to Floridians, naming Stake, Chumba, LuckyLand and Global Poker — with an October 23 deadline to explain their controls.

In this article

Florida's campaign against sweepstakes casinos has a new front: the pipes that advertise them. Attorney General James Uthmeier announced on X that letters went out last week to Google, Meta, Reddit, Snap and TikTok — not the operators themselves — demanding each platform explain how it will prevent sweepstakes casino ads from reaching Florida residents. The deadline to respond is October 23.

The letters name specific brands: Stake, plus VGW's trio of Chumba Casino, LuckyLand Slots and Global Poker. It's the same enforcement-by-pressure doctrine Florida has been building since August, when the AG filed illegal-gambling and consumer-protection suits against Stake, VGW and four payment processors. Now the target is distribution — if the casinos can't advertise, they can't acquire players at scale.

Regulation through the ad stack

The tactic mirrors a playbook state AGs have used before: rather than litigate operator legality state by state, pressure the infrastructure everyone depends on. Florida's legislature already declined to act — HB 591 died in committee and SB 1580 expired with the session — so the AG's office is building a de facto exclusion through platform policy instead of statute. If the platforms comply, Florida effectively bans sweepstakes advertising without a ban ever passing.

  • Recipients: Google, Meta, Reddit, Snap and TikTok — the core paid-acquisition channels for sweepstakes operators.
  • Named brands: Stake, Chumba Casino, LuckyLand, Global Poker (the latter three all operated by VGW).
  • Deadline: October 23 for platforms to describe how they prevent such ads reaching Floridians.
  • Context: Florida AG already sued Stake, VGW and four payment processors in August under illegal-gambling and FDUTPA theories.

Where this leaves the industry

Sweepstakes casinos are already statutorily banned in nine states, with Oklahoma's ban effective November 1. Florida's approach creates a tenth category: no ban, but an enforcement environment hostile enough that advertising — the industry's growth engine — may shut down anyway. For an industry whose customer acquisition runs through social and search, losing ad access in a top-three population state is functionally a market exit.

The ad-letter campaign extends the statutory picture mapped in which states ban sweepstakes and explains part of why operators are already pivoting into prediction markets.

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