Stake.us, Coinbase Underage Gambling Lawsuit Goes Federal

Stake.com, Stake.us and two Coinbase entities are defendants in a New York underage-gambling lawsuit that was pulled into federal court on July 15, and five days later defence counsel told the judge that every defendant intends to force the case into private arbitration. The proof already filed that the plaintiff agreed to arbitrate is a set of account logs dating his first acceptance of Stake.com's terms to August 31, 2017. By the figures his own side has given, he would have been about 11 or 12 that day.

The defendant list runs to eleven names and includes both Stake founders personally. What makes the July filings worth reading is that Stake has already put its evidence on the record, and that evidence is its own sign-up data.

What is the case, and who is being sued?

Doe v. Medium Rare N.V., No. 1:26-cv-05975, is now in the Southern District of New York in front of District Judge John P. Cronan, with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang designated for referred matters. It started in Manhattan, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, index 154566/2026, before Justice Dakota D. Ramseur.

All eleven defendants, taken straight from the caption:

1. Medium Rare N.V., doing business as Stake.com
2. Sweepsteaks Ltd., doing business as Stake.us
3. Easygo Group Holdings Pty Ltd.
4. Easygo Entertainment Pty Ltd.
5. Medium Rare Ltd.
6. Slicemedia B.V.
7. Bijan Tehrani
8. Edward Craven
9. Christopher Freeman
10. Coinbase, Inc.
11. Coinbase Global, Inc.

Tehrani and Craven are the Stake co-founders named in our Sweepsteaks Limited operator profile. Freeman has his own separate counsel, and the docket did not explain his alleged role until the August 5 letters: his lawyers at Alston & Bird record that the plaintiff says he co-founded Primedice, which the complaint calls a predecessor site to Stake.com, and calls him "integrally involved" in its design and operation. Our report on those letters has the detail, including that Freeman sued Stake.com himself in 2023.

The allegations are not ours to summarise first-hand, because the complaint is not on the federal docket and we have not read it. The announcement from Seeger Weiss, one of three firms acting for the plaintiff alongside The Schenk Law Firm and Rafferty Domnick Cunningham & Yaffa, says the plaintiff "was first recruited onto the platform at age 12". It alleges Stake.com targeted minors through a network of paid influencers, that the platform used VPNs, mirror sites and Discord networks to get around age-verification requirements, and that Coinbase processed the purchases and transfers to offshore gambling wallets despite what the firm calls "clear indicators of the plaintiff's age, including identity mismatches and a bank account labeled 'High School Checking'".

Case-tracking coverage puts the plaintiff's current age at 20 and the gambling period at ages 13 to 19, and records the suit as an individual action rather than a class action. It seeks compensatory, punitive and statutory treble damages, an injunction requiring real age verification and VPN detection, and, directly relevant to what happened in July, a declaratory judgment that no enforceable arbitration agreement exists because the plaintiff lacked the capacity to contract as a minor.

Our registration and KYC guide sets out what age and identity checks are meant to catch at sign-up, and when a US sweepstakes site runs them.

Those are allegations, and they are contested. No court has found any defendant liable for anything. Neither Stake nor Coinbase has issued a public response in any report we checked, and their filings so far are procedural.

What actually changed in July?

Four things, all from documents we pulled off the docket and read.

The removal was filed under 9 U.S.C. § 205, the provision that lets a defendant move a case to federal court when it relates to an arbitration agreement covered by the New York Convention. That is the arbitration clause doing work before anyone has even briefed it. It was the second Stake.us case moved out of a state court that month: the Tuscaloosa RICO suit was removed to Alabama federal court on July 21, on a different statutory hook.

The July 20 letter, signed by David McGill of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe for the Stake defendants, is blunt: "All of the Defendants anticipate moving to compel arbitration." Counsel met and conferred with the plaintiff's lawyers on July 17.

One thing to be precise about, because it is easy to read the letter as more settled than it is. The letter asks Judge Cronan to stay the July 22 deadline for every defendant to answer the complaint, and records that the co-defendants and the plaintiff consent to that request. Party consent is not a court order.

He granted it, the next day. The July 21 order extends the deadline "to file an Answer or a premotion letter" to August 5, 2026, and requires the plaintiff to respond within three business days of any premotion letter. The joint proposed briefing schedule the letter promised for July 24 was never filed; the extension replaced it.

Then August 5 came and the letter's promise turned into filings. Three separate defence camps moved on the same day. David McGill wrote to Judge Cronan for the Stake defendants about a motion to compel arbitration. Christopher Freeman, the defendant whose alleged role the docket does not explain and who has his own counsel, filed a letter motion for a conference on "anticipated motion to compel arbitration and stay". And Coinbase, Inc. and Coinbase Global, Inc. filed their own premotion letter motion, attaching three exhibits: their 2022, 2023 and 2025 user agreements. A proposed stipulation and order went in from the Stake defendants the same day.

The Coinbase exhibits are the detail worth holding onto. A payment and exchange company sued over transfers to a gambling platform is answering with its own terms of service, from three different years, for the same reason the operators do: to establish which version this user accepted and when. The evidence in this case is turning out to be paperwork on all sides.

What proof has Stake filed that the plaintiff agreed to arbitrate?

Its own sign-up logs. On July 16, Jarrod Anthony Febbraio, who describes himself as one of the corporate executives at both companies with the title Director of Stake, filed two sworn declarations, each executed in Singapore. They are not simply copies of old terms. They are timestamped records of this plaintiff accepting them, and every date in them comes from the operator's side of the file:

The Stake.us declaration adds that the account "remains open as of the date of this declaration".

Set those dates against the ages the plaintiff's side has given. Seeger Weiss says he was recruited at 12; the case-tracking summary puts him at 20 now. On those figures he would have been about 11 or 12 on the August 2017 date that Stake.com's own records give for his first acceptance of its terms. That is the collision at the centre of this case, and it is documented from the operator's side of the file rather than the plaintiff's.

One detail in the Stake.us declaration is worth knowing no matter who you play with. It states that the Stake.us terms let a user opt out of the arbitration agreement within 30 days of accepting them, and that Stake.us has no record of the plaintiff ever doing so. That opt-out window is a standard feature of these clauses and it is the one moment a player has any leverage over where a future dispute gets heard. It is also the sort of thing nobody reads at sign-up.

Our Drake and Stake.us arbitration piece counted six federal district courts that have enforced this clause and one that refused. The one refusal, the Minnesota order, turned partly on Stake.us failing to prove the player had agreed to the terms at all, which is exactly the gap these declarations are built to close. Proof of acceptance is what decides these motions: a Georgia judge sent a Chumba Casino and LuckyLand class action into arbitration on July 1 because VGW could show the player had accepted its terms. None of those cases turned on the age of the person who clicked accept.

Who actually owns Stake.us?

Here is where our own site needs correcting. Our operator profile describes Sweepsteaks Limited as sitting under the EasyGo group. The Rule 7.1 disclosure the companies filed on July 17 says something more specific: Sweepsteaks Ltd.'s parent is Well Done STK Limited, and Well Done STK Limited's parent is Ashwood Holdings Pty Ltd. Medium Rare N.V.'s parent is Lockwood Ltd, and Medium Rare Ltd.'s parent is Medium Rare N.V. Easygo Group Holdings Pty Ltd. and Slicemedia B.V. are both stated to have no parent company, and Easygo Group Holdings is the parent of Easygo Entertainment, not of Sweepsteaks.

So on paper the two Stake businesses sit on separate parent chains, whatever they share in branding and founders. One limit on how far that can be pushed: the filing expressly says Easygo Group Holdings and Slicemedia have no parent, but says nothing either way about who sits above Ashwood Holdings or Lockwood. Common ownership further up is not disclosed here, and it is not ruled out. What we can say is that this is a sworn corporate filing rather than a press description, and it is the most precise public statement of the structure we have seen. We are logging the correction to the operator profile.

Why does an arbitration clause matter to a player?

Because it decides whether a dispute with an operator is ever heard in public. Arbitration is individual, private, and usually final. It removes the class mechanism, which is the only realistic route for a player whose loss is too small to fund a lawsuit alone.

This is also why litigation exposure sits inside our scoring rather than beside it. Stake.us carries the lowest Trust and Safety score of any brand we rank, and our Stake.us review explains why against genuinely strong marks elsewhere; how we rate sets out the weighting. If the legal file is what puts you off, the Stake.us alternatives comparison lines up the closest options, Stake.us against McLuck puts one of them head to head, and the ranked list of tested casinos has the rest.

New York context, since that is where this was filed: the state has banned the dual-currency model outright, and our New York state page carries the current position. The wider question of whether sweepstakes casinos are legal is state by state, and it is separate from the offshore crypto site at the centre of this complaint.

What is still unknown?

The motions themselves. As of our re-read of the docket on August 11, every defence camp has told the court it intends to compel arbitration, and none has yet filed the motion; under the schedule the parties proposed, they are due August 28. The judge has acted once. Docket entry 24, a memo endorsement entered on August 6, the day after the three letter motions and the proposed stipulation went in, became publicly retrievable after our August 8 read. It is signed by Judge Cronan and endorsed onto the face of the Stake defendants' own pre-motion letter, and it orders the parties to file a joint letter by August 13 "explaining whether a court must have personal jurisdiction over a party in order to grant that party's motion to compel arbitration." Nobody briefed that question; he raised it himself. Our report on the endorsement sets out why it cuts at the defendants, who have expressly reserved the right to argue no US court has jurisdiction over them at all.

The notice of removal is still not available to us, so the removal statute above comes from the court's own docketed cause of action rather than from the document. The state court decided the plaintiff's order to show cause with a temporary restraining order on June 4, and we have not obtained that decision. One filing in the state case was submitted under a sealing request on June 18.

We will update this piece when the motions to compel arbitration are actually filed and briefed.

Sources & documents

• Federal docket, Doe v. Medium Rare N.V., No. 1:26-cv-05975 (S.D.N.Y.)
• Exhibit A to the notice of removal: NYSCEF document list, index 154566/2026
• Declaration of Jarrod Anthony Febbraio regarding Stake.com, filed July 16, 2026
• Declaration of Jarrod Anthony Febbraio regarding Stake.us, filed July 16, 2026
• Corporate Stake Defendants' Rule 7.1 disclosure statement, filed July 17, 2026
• Letter to Judge Cronan from David McGill, July 20, 2026
• Stake defendants' pre-motion letter, Doc. 20, filed August 5, 2026
• Christopher Freeman's pre-motion letter, Doc. 21, filed August 5, 2026
• Memo endorsement, Doc. 24, entered August 6, 2026
• Seeger Weiss announcement of the filing
• Plaintiff firms' press release, April 15, 2026
• ClaimDepot case summary

Court records were retrieved and read on August 3, 2026, and the docket was re-read on August 6, August 8 and August 11, 2026, which is where the July 21 order, the August 5 filings and the August 6 memo endorsement come from. For the July 21 order and the August 5 letter motions we have the docket text rather than the documents; the August 6 endorsement and the August 5 pre-motion letters we downloaded and read on August 11, and the quotation from the endorsement is verbatim. Account dates, terms-acceptance timestamps and the arbitration opt-out window are taken from the two Febbraio declarations, which are sworn filings by the defendants and are their account of events, not findings by any court. Descriptions of what the complaint alleges come from the plaintiff's own law firms and from case-tracking coverage, not from the complaint itself, which is not on the federal docket and which we have not read. The plaintiff's ages are as reported by those sources; his date of birth is not public.

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