Chumba Casino Mississippi Lawsuit: Motion to Dismiss Filed

A motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and a motion to compel were filed on September 8, 2026 in the Mississippi class action seeking to recover what residents lost on Chumba Casino, Global Poker and LuckyLand Slots. They arrived with two supporting memoranda and a Rule 7.1 disclosure statement, five entries in all, and none of them has been ruled on. They are the first motions on the file since an order lifted a stay eleven days earlier, and the clerk has labelled them exactly as it labelled the arbitration motion the VGW defendants filed in 2024.

The case is Saulny v. VGW Holdings Limited, No. 3:24-cv-00619 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, before District Judge Henry T. Wingate. We read the docket on September 9 and have not seen these entries reported anywhere else. Nothing has been decided, and nothing here is a finding against anybody.

What exactly was filed?

Less than we would like to tell you. Entries 35 to 39 carry no clerk narrative in the public docket mirror, none of the five documents is downloadable, and the mirror does not name the filing party. What it gives is the label the clerk attached to each one.

We are reading these as defence filings, and we will say why rather than assert it. A plaintiff does not move to dismiss her own case for want of jurisdiction. More to the point, this docket has run the same play before: on November 18, 2024 the VGW defendants filed a motion to compel arbitration at entry 8 and a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction at entry 10, and Judge Wingate's order of September 26, 2025 disposed of both at once, "finding as moot, at this juncture, 8 Motion to Compel; finding as moot, at this juncture, 10 Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction; granting, conditionally, 23 Motion to Amend/Correct."

One caution about the word stay, because it is easy to overstate. The only stay this docket records in text is entry 12, a November 19, 2024 "ORDER STAYING DISCOVERY" signed by Magistrate Judge LaKeysha Greer Isaac, which also cancelled the case management conference set for January 7, 2025. The case itself did not stop: the parties briefed a motion to amend through 2025 and were still filing on attorney fees in October that year, after which the docket went quiet until August 21, 2026. The August 28 order lifting a stay carries no text, so which stay it lifted is a reading of the file rather than something the court has said.

Those two motions were never decided on their merits. They fell away because the plaintiff was allowed to amend. The amended complaint went in on August 25, the stay came off on August 28, and the same pair of motion types is back on the docket a fortnight later.

Was the September 8 motion about arbitration?

The docket does not say in words, but it says it in labels, and the labels on this file are unusually informative.

Entry 8 in 2024 reads in full: "MOTION to Compel Arbitration by VGW Holdings Limited, VGW Luckyland Inc., VGW GP Limited". The document label the clerk attached to that motion was the single word "Compel". Entry 37, filed on September 8, 2026, carries that same one-word label and nothing else. The same holds for the other pair: entry 10 in 2024 was a "MOTION to Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction or, in The Alternative, to Transfer, in Part, and Otherwise Dismiss The Complaint", labelled "Dismiss/Lack of Jurisdiction". Entries 9 and 11 were the supporting memoranda. Set the two rounds side by side and the four labels line up one for one.

So "Compel" is not an ambiguous word on this docket. It is the label this clerk used for a motion to compel arbitration in this case. That is an inference from a naming convention rather than a reading of the motion, and we cannot rule out that a motion to compel something else - discovery, most obviously - would draw the same label.

One more thread points the same way. When the 2024 motion to compel arbitration was live, the plaintiff's October 6, 2025 response to Judge Wingate's order attached the JAMS Streamlined Rules as an exhibit, which is what a party does when the fight is about being pushed into arbitration. Five days after that motion was mooted, four defendants - VGW GP Limited, VGW Holdings Limited, VGW Luckyland Inc. and VGW Malta Limited - moved for their attorney fees.

If the court does compel arbitration this time, the class action ends as a class action. That is the practical stake for anybody in Mississippi who lost money on these three brands. A Georgia federal judge did exactly that to a different Chumba Casino and LuckyLand Slots class action on July 1, 2026, and what happened when that case was sent to arbitration is the clearest picture available of what this docket would look like on the other side of a compel order.

What is the Mississippi Chumba lawsuit about?

The claim is about getting money back. The complaint pleads a single count under Mississippi Code section 87-1-5, the state's gambling-loss recovery statute, on behalf of residents who lost money on Chumba Casino, Global Poker or LuckyLand Slots, reaching back at least three years. We set out the whole claim, its named plaintiff and the two VGW entities the amendment adds when the stay lifted on August 28; nothing about the claim itself has changed since. What is new here is the defence answer to it, and the fact that it arrived as a jurisdiction-and-arbitration pair rather than an answer to the complaint.

Old loss-recovery statutes are doing a lot of work in this category right now. The two Minnesota class actions against VGW run on Minnesota's version of the same idea, and neither state has a sweepstakes-specific ban, which is what our Mississippi sweepstakes legality page sets out. If the mechanics of that carve-out are what you are trying to follow, what the sweepstakes carve-out actually allows is the background.

Do Mississippi players need to do anything?

No. There is nothing for a player to do about it, and that is worth saying plainly rather than leaving implied. No class has been certified, no claims process exists, no deadline is running, and nobody legitimate will ask you for a fee to join. The one thing worth doing is a record-keeping one: if you played any of the three brands in Mississippi, the class as pleaded is defined by past losses, so account statements and redemption history are the only things that would ever matter, and they are easier to export now than after an account closes.

The arbitration clause behind the compel motion is a separate question with its own clock, and it is not one this docket opens or closes: how the sweepstakes arbitration opt-out window works sets out which operators give 30 days and why the count starts on the day you sign up rather than the day a case is filed.

Nothing on this docket changes availability or balances anywhere. It does not touch the separate LuckyLand Slots redemption deadline of September 14, which is a wind-down with its own clock and is the more urgent thing on a LuckyLand player's calendar this week. Our VGW operator profile tracks the corporate structure the four defendant entities sit in, and the brand pages are Chumba Casino, Global Poker and LuckyLand Slots.

Sources & documents

• Saulny v. VGW Holdings Limited, No. 3:24-cv-00619 (S.D. Miss.) - full docket
• CourtListener docket-entry index for No. 3:24-cv-00619
• Proposed amended complaint attached to the April 24, 2025 motion to amend (PDF)

The docket was read on September 9, 2026 and lists September 8 as its date of last known filing. Entries 33 to 39 are title-only in the public mirror: no clerk narrative, no filing party and no retrievable document, and we tried both attachment paths for each of the five September 8 entries and got HTTP 404 on all ten. Every quotation above comes from an entry that does carry clerk text. CourtListener mirrors what somebody has pulled from PACER, so an absence here is an absence from the public mirror rather than from the court's file. No court has held that VGW or any of its entities did anything unlawful, and every allegation in the underlying complaint remains an allegation.

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