South Carolina Lawsuit Names Chumba, High 5, Zula Owners

A Delaware-registered company is using a South Carolina statute from 1712 to sue eight operator groups over the money state residents lost to them, among them the owners of Chumba Casino, High 5 Casino and Zula Casino. Under that statute any recovery is split between whoever brings the case and the county it was filed in, so no player collects. Every defendant has moved to dismiss or to force the dispute into arbitration, and on September 21 the court entered an order on their joint request for a hearing.

The case is South Carolina Gambling Recovery LLC v. Underdog Sports Holdings, Inc., No. 8:26-cv-02182 in the District of South Carolina. It started in state court in Oconee County as case 2025-CP-37-00520 and was removed to federal court on June 2, 2026 by the four VGW entities named in it. We read the docket in full on September 22, 2026.

This is not the South Carolina Gambling Recovery case we have written about before. The same plaintiff name sits on an older District of South Carolina docket, 8:25-cv-12859, filed October 7, 2025 against the prediction market Kalshi, which we listed in our Zula Casino Kentucky write-up. This one is new, it carries a different case number, and its defendants are sweepstakes casinos.

Who is being sued, and which brands do they run?

Eight defendant groups have appeared. Three of them are sweepstakes or social casino operators, four run picks products, and one is tied to no consumer brand anywhere in the filings we read.

Two notes on that first column. The d/b/a and f/k/a strings for PrizePicks, Betr and High 5 are the docket's own words. The South Carolina docket names the Zula group only as "Blazegames Inc, Blazesoft Ltd, SCPS", with no trading name attached; the tie from SCPS to Zula Casino comes from the Kentucky opinion cited below, which defines the "Zula defendants" as "Blazesoft LTD, Blazegames Inc., and SCPS LLC d/b/a Zula Casino". Blitz Studios Inc. is named without any trading name in either document, so we are not putting a product next to it.

How can a company sue over someone else's gambling losses?

South Carolina keeps a 1712 loss-recovery statute on the books. Section 32-1-10 lets someone who lost fifty dollars or more "by playing at cards, dice table or any other game whatsoever" sue the winner to get it back, within three months. Section 32-1-20 is the one that makes a case like this possible: if the loser does not sue in that window, "it shall be lawful for any other person" to sue instead, and to recover the loss "and treble the value thereof", with half going to the person who sued and half "to the use of the county in which the offense shall have been committed".

That is the route the Gambling Recovery entities have taken state by state, and it explains both the Delaware-registered plaintiff and the Oconee County filing. The second amended complaint is not in the public mirror, so we cannot quote which subsection it pleads. What we can see is that the plaintiff's own July 10 opposition brief attaches an exhibit titled "Statutes of Anne", which is the English statute South Carolina's chapter descends from. The same two sections are behind the South Carolina case against DraftKings and Polymarket, a separate Charleston filing that the defendants removed to federal court on September 2, brought by an individual rather than a recovery company.

Where does the case stand right now?

Everything is pending, and it has been fully briefed for two months. This is the sequence on the docket.

That last entry is the one that moved this week, and it is also the one we can say least about. The public docket mirror carries the clerk's label and no text, and the District of South Carolina's own filing feed timestamps it at 20:12 GMT the same day, so we can confirm an order exists and we are not going to tell you which way it went.

The defendants are also attacking the plaintiff's standing to be in court at all. A June 26 affidavit attaches the Delaware Secretary of State record for SC Gambling Recovery, a page about Verdis Management LLC and a South Carolina business-entity name search.

The exhibit lists on both sides are the real tell, because this case is being argued out of other states' files. Betr, High 5 and Dabble each attached an Ohio order granting a motion to dismiss, an Illinois order granting a motion to dismiss, and a Massachusetts clerk's notice staying discovery. Underdog's July 17 reply attached the Kentucky plaintiff's omnibus response, a supplemental brief on standing filed by DC Gambling Recovery LLC, and an order on motions in Illinois Gambling Recovery, LLC v. Dabble Sports, LLC, No. 2025-L-006999 (Ill. Cir. Ct. Cook Cnty. Mar. 3, 2026). The plaintiff is doing the same thing in the other direction, leading its July 10 opposition with an order denying a motion to compel. Five other jurisdictions are already on this docket by way of exhibit.

Why does the Kentucky outcome matter here?

Because the near-identical case there is already dead. On August 18, 2026 the Eastern District of Kentucky dismissed Kentucky Gambling Recovery LLC v. Underdog Sports Holdings, Inc. for lack of standing and denied the arbitration motions as moot, in a 21-page opinion we read in full and wrote up in the Kentucky loss-recovery dismissal. Three of the eight groups in South Carolina were defendants there too: Underdog, Dabble and the Zula group. Kentucky is also carrying 13 separate class actions against sweepstakes operators, which we track apart from this one, and our Kentucky state page holds the legal position there.

Two things stop that from being a forecast. The first is that federal courts have split on exactly this question. The same Kentucky opinion records, at pages 17 and 18, that the District Court for the District of Columbia found a related Gambling Recovery entity did have Article III standing in DC Gambling Recovery LLC v. Am. Wagering, Inc., No. 25-CV-01023 (D.D.C. Mar. 26, 2026), holding that "third-party Statute of Anne lawsuits are cases and controversies of the sort traditionally amenable to, and resolved by, the judicial process". It dismissed that case anyway on the specifics of the District's own statute. The Kentucky court declined to follow the standing half of it, calling the District's statute "wholly different from Kentucky's statute" because the District "has an identifiable stake in the outcome" - its statute sends one half of any treble recovery to the plaintiff and the remainder to the District, while under Kentucky's a winning claimant, in the words the court quoted, "pocket[s] all their winnings".

That distinction is the one to watch, because South Carolina's statute is built the D.C. way and not the Kentucky way. Section 32-1-20 splits the recovery in exactly the same two halves, one to whoever sues and the other "to the use of the county in which the offense shall have been committed". The reasoning that killed the Kentucky case turns on a feature South Carolina's statute does not share.

The second thing is jurisdictional. Kentucky sits in the Sixth Circuit and the opinion leans on Sixth Circuit precedent. South Carolina sits in the Fourth, and Judge Clarke is not bound by any of it. If the remand motion is granted first, the case goes back to a state court where the federal standing analysis does not apply at all.

What does this mean for a player in South Carolina?

Nothing changes about your account today. No brand in our file excludes South Carolina, no operator has announced an exit, and none of the pending motions would freeze a balance. The reason to follow it is that the third-party route pays half of any recovery to a county, which gives the model a local sponsor no other litigation theory has, and that is what would make it spread.

Our own South Carolina sweepstakes casinos page currently says the state has drawn no enforcement campaign and describes the legal position as straightforward. That was written before this docket existed and it now understates the picture, so it needs a litigation section. For the wider legal position see our guide to whether sweepstakes casinos are legal, the VGW operator profile, and our ranked list of sweepstakes casinos for where these brands sit.

Sources & documents

• Docket, South Carolina Gambling Recovery LLC v. Underdog Sports Holdings, Inc., No. 8:26-cv-02182 (D.S.C.) - every entry number, date, filer and quotation of docket text above comes from this page, read on September 22, 2026
• District of South Carolina public filing feed, carrying the September 21 order entry at 20:12 GMT
• South Carolina Code of Laws Title 32, Chapter 1, sections 32-1-10 and 32-1-20
• Memorandum Opinion and Order, Kentucky Gambling Recovery LLC v. Underdog Sports Holdings, Inc., No. 3:25-cv-00066 (E.D. Ky. Aug. 18, 2026)

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