Crown Coins Ohio Lawsuit: Judge Weighs Forced Arbitration

A federal judge in Cincinnati is sitting on a fully briefed motion that would push an Ohio class action against Crown Coins Casino out of court and into private arbitration. In arguing for it, the operator's own lawyers told the court something no Crown Coins player is likely to have read: the terms you accept at signup pick the law of Israel to govern your relationship with the company.

The case is Drollinger v. Sunflower Limited and Sunflower Technology, Inc., d/b/a CrownCoinsCasino.com, No. 1:26-cv-00210-JPH, in the Southern District of Ohio. Chris Drollinger filed it as a class action with a jury demand on February 27, 2026. It is assigned to Judge Jeffery P. Hopkins, with Magistrate Judge Karen L. Litkovitz referred. It is not the only live case naming the company: Sunflower also drew the first proposed agreed order in Kentucky's sweepstakes class actions on August 28, 2026.

Nothing about the underlying claim has been decided. What has happened is procedural, and it is the part that decides whether anything else ever gets decided in public.

What is actually in front of the Ohio judge?

One question: who rules on whether Crown Coins has to answer this case in court at all.

Sunflower moved to compel arbitration on June 23, 2026. The two sides then asked for an agreed briefing schedule, and Judge Hopkins granted it on July 14. That order is the only thing the judge has done on this motion. Drollinger opposed on July 28, Sunflower replied on August 18 with a 17-page brief, and the docket has recorded nothing on the motion since. As of today it is fully briefed and undecided.

The reply brief is the only filing in the sequence available free, and it is the document every quotation below comes from.

Why does Israeli law appear in an Ohio gambling case?

Because Sunflower put it there, in a footnote, hedging its own argument. "Sunflower does not concede that Ohio law applies to the merits of Plaintiff's claims," the brief says. "The Terms contain a choice-of-law clause, pursuant to which the parties agreed that the law of Israel governs the Terms and the parties' relationship." The citation is to the operator's own terms, which reached the court as an exhibit to a sworn declaration from Anthony Campoli filed with the motion (ECF 15-2, 53 pages), at section 19.9.

Those are the standard terms, not a bespoke deal with this plaintiff, so the clause describes every Crown Coins account. What makes it worth knowing is that it sits inside a document a US player clicks past in about two seconds, and it works alongside a clause that keeps the dispute out of any courtroom.

Where Sunflower itself is based is a separate question, and one we have deliberately not closed. A 2025 class action in the Northern District of Ohio alleges the two Sunflower entities are "foreign corporations organized under the laws of Israel, with its principal place of business in Tel Aviv-Jaffa Israel", and the Better Business Bureau lists "Sunflower Limited" as the operator's alternate business name. That is a plaintiff's allegation plus a directory entry, which is why our Crown Coins review records the corporate identity as unresolved rather than settled. The Ohio reply brief does not state where the company sits. It states only which country's law it says applies.

We could not check the clause against the live site, and not for want of asking the right address. crowncoinscasino.com publishes a sitemap listing four URLs, one of which is its terms of service. That path returns the same 11,672-byte JavaScript shell as the home page, as does a path we invented that has never existed. So the wording quoted above is the wording the operator gave the court, and there is no public copy to hold it against.

What does the arbitration clause cover?

Everything, on the operator's reading. The brief quotes the player's agreement to arbitrate all disputes "arising out of or relating to these Terms of Service, the Platform, the formation of these Terms of Service, our relationship or any other dispute between you and Sunflower", and says the arbitration runs under the JAMS Rules, which hand the arbitrator "disputes over the formation, existence, validity, interpretation or scope of the agreement under which Arbitration is sought".

Drollinger's answer is that the whole contract is void, so the arbitration clause inside it is void too. The brief quotes him: "The Terms of Service here are unenforceable under Ohio law because they are a contract to engage in illegal gambling conduct."

Sunflower's reply is the Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Buckeye Check Cashing v. Cardegna, which held that an attack on a whole contract goes to the arbitrator, not the judge. That argument has been winning.

Has any court let a sweeps player stay in court?

One has, and the operators know exactly which one. On July 1, 2026 a Minnesota federal judge refused to compel arbitration in Wolters v. Sweepsteaks Limited, the Stake.us case, reading the clause's "by agreeing to these Terms and Conditions" opener as making the promise to arbitrate depend on the terms being valid in the first place.

Crown Coins' brief calls that decision "a lone outlier in what is otherwise an ocean of authority" and says it "is on appeal before the Eighth Circuit and is likely to be reversed". We read the operator's opening brief in that appeal two days ago, in Stake.us telling the Eighth Circuit an arbitrator should decide; the player's answering brief is due October 13.

Against Wolters, the reply brief lines up rulings that went the other way, several of them in the last three months.

Different operators, different states, one result. We have watched the same pattern arrive brand by brand, in four courts compelling arbitration against Modo.us players and in the Chumba and LuckyLand ruling.

What does this mean if you play at Crown Coins?

Practically, three things.

1. Your dispute route is almost certainly private. If the Ohio judge follows the seven rulings above, the class action ends as a public case and Drollinger argues his claim alone, in front of a JAMS arbitrator, under terms the company says Israeli law governs. That matters more at this brand than at most: Crown Coins carries an F rating and hundreds of complaints at the Better Business Bureau, most of them from players who could not cash out, and every one of those disputes runs down the same channel.
2. The opt-out window is the only lever you ever had. Across unrelated operators the standard is 30 days from signup, and we set out how to use it in our look at the sweeps arbitration opt-out window. Miss it and this is your route.
3. None of this says Crown Coins is or is not lawful in Ohio. That question is precisely what nobody has ruled on, which is the point of the motion. Our guide to sweepstakes casino legality covers the state-by-state position, and Ohio's own page has where the state currently sits.

Trust and safety carries the heaviest single weight in our ranked list of sweepstakes casinos, at 15 per cent of the score, and an unresolved corporate identity is exactly the sort of thing it is there to catch.

Sources & documents

• Defendants' Reply in Further Support of Their Motion to Compel Arbitration, Drollinger v. Sunflower Limited, No. 1:26-cv-00210-JPH (S.D. Ohio, filed August 18, 2026) - 17 pages, PAGEID 184-200, the source of every quotation attributed to the brief, including the Israeli choice-of-law footnote and the case list
• Docket entries for the same case, in filing order - all 22 numbered entries, read September 13, 2026: the February 27 complaint, the executed service waivers docketed March 30 and April 1 (sent March 25), the June 23 motion and the Campoli declaration filed with it, the July 14 briefing-schedule order, the July 28 opposition and the August 18 reply, and the absence of any later entry. ECF 22 is the only document in the case flagged as freely available
• McNamara v. Sunflower Ltd., complaint, N.D. Ohio 1:25-cv-01757 - filed August 22, 2025; paragraph 3 is the source of the allegation that the Sunflower entities are Israeli corporations. A separate case, and an allegation rather than a finding
• Caption sweep for related sweepstakes dockets - how this case surfaced alongside the Eighth Circuit appeal it turns on
• crowncoinscasino.com sitemap and the terms-of-service path it declares - both fetched September 13, 2026. The sitemap lists four URLs; the terms path, the home page and an invented control path all return the identical 11,672-byte application shell

The PDF was downloaded on September 13, 2026 and every quotation is verbatim from it. Drollinger's opposition brief and the underlying complaint are not available free, so his arguments appear here only as his opponent quoted them, which is how they are labelled throughout. The allegation that Crown Coins operates unlawful gambling in Ohio is an allegation in a pending case; no court has made any finding on it. We did not seek comment from Sunflower Limited and have none.

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