Charlotte Shields-Rossi | a&e editor

For my 18th birthday, I was given 18 scratch cards, and I won a grand total of $2. Still, winning any amount of money, no matter how small, felt amazing. The next day I went to the gas station to collect my winnings and vowed to never play the odds ever again. It felt so amazing, but it was a drug I couldn’t afford to be addicted to.

My fear of acquiring a gambling addiction means I refuse to play the lottery, don’t have any plans to go to Las Vegas, won’t play bingo and certainly will not download Kalshi.

Kalshi is a web-based prediction market platform that mainly serves as a space for sports betting, but also culture and politics. You can bet real money predicting the 2028 Republican presidential nominee and the release date for GTA 6 — all from the comfort of your bed.

Online betting and gambling is very convenient, but that convenience makes it so much more addictive.

According to a 2025 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, internet searches seeking help for gambling addiction increased 23% nationally since 2018. And it just so happens, 2018 is also the year the Supreme Court legalized sports betting.

Playing the odds has been around forever — just look at betting on horse races which has been around for centuries.

The difference between then and now is you used to have to go to a state where it was legal, place your wager at the window and wait until the game was over to collect your winnings. Now you can bet on the next Secretariat from the comfort of your own bed.

It has become so easy to bet your life savings away.

About 1.2% of the world’s adult population suffers from a gambling disorder. The side effects of this addiction go beyond just financial stress, it can lead to relationship breakdown, family violence, mental illness and even suicide, all according to the World Health Organization.

Kalshi does not consider themselves to be an online gambling site, they follow the rules of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That is because they market themselves as an online prediction market, which means they circumvent a lot of gambling rules and regulations.

Whatever legal and licensing mumbo-jumbo they try to hide behind doesn’t change the facts — it’s gambling.

But Kalshi is so adamant on proving they are an above-board platform that this month rolled out a new ad campaign.

The campaign that would be popping up in Washington, D.C., public transportation areas, is meant to share the rules of the platform.

“Rule #1, we ban insider trading, because Kalshi is a federally regulated U.S. exchange.”

This is true. Kalshi does have a strict insider trading and market manipulation policy, with identity verification and trade surveillance as protection from the activity. But it still happens (I would bet you a dollar!).

Two weeks ago, a MrBeast employee Artem Kaptur, was fired from Beast Industries following accusations of insider trading on Kalshi. Kaptur traded around $4,000 on streaming markets related to MrBeast videos with “near-perfect” success.

Kalshi has a wide range of what you can bet on, which makes it a hot bed for market manipulation.

For decades most insider trading was committed by big wigs in large firms, but the rise of web-based prediction markets have increased the range of who can commit this kind of crime.

When a market such as “Will Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce be married this year?” is open to bet on, it means that anyone involved in the planning could very well bet on the market with total accuracy — the entire RSVP list, the florist, even Swift and Kelce themselves.

Not only does it create an unfair advantage for the people with insider information, it makes it possible (and profitable) for people to influence a certain outcome.

Lets say that a Kalshi market opened up asking “what are the odds that The Duke will write an article about online gambling?” it would be pretty profitable for me to bet on yes and then write one.

The second rule on the Kalshi ad campaign reads: “Rule #2, we don’t offer death markets, because Kalshi is a federally regulated U.S. exchange.”

Death markets are markets directly settling to someone’s death. Now this is true for Kalshi; they don’t allow death markets. But the ad leaves out the troubling and controversial markets that they have allowed.

Last summer, a Kalshi market titled “Will the IPC classify Gaza as experiencing famine in 2025?” was opened. On Polymarket (similar to Kalshi) an even more apathetic market opened: “Gaza mass population relocation in 2025?”

Betting on the hardships of others, no matter how twisted it sounds, is a very real and profitable market. It is troubling that people can get rich from the misfortune of others.

I get that gambling has been around forever, but these platforms have taken everything wrong with old-school betting and have made it so much worse.

If you are thinking of betting a buck or two on how long Karoline Leavitt will talk at her next press briefing, maybe don’t, you are playing a losing game. The house always wins in the end.

Charlotte Shields-Rossi can be reached at shieldsrossic@duq.edu