Stake.us Players Oppose Drake, Adin Ross Dismissal Motions

Two New Mexico players suing Stake.us filed their answer on September 21, 2026 to the motions Drake and Adin Ross made to get out of the case, and asked the judge either to keep both men in it or to let the players first serve 19 written questions and 15 document demands about how many New Mexico viewers used their promo codes. No judge has ruled. Nothing about your Stake.us account changes today.

The case is Torres v. Sweepsteaks Limited, No. 1:25-cv-01292, in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. Sweepsteaks Limited is the corporate entity behind Stake.us. The new filing is entry 28: a 14-page opposition brief plus a 22-page exhibit. We downloaded both from the public docket and read them in full, which is how we check everything we publish.

Everything below describes what one side has argued in a court filing. None of it has been tested, and none of it has been decided.

What did the Stake.us plaintiffs file on September 21?

One entry, two documents. Entry 28 is a "Response in Opposition to Motion" answering both of the motions filed on September 7: entry 26 from Aubrey Drake Graham and entry 27 from Adin Ross, each asking the court to dismiss him for lack of personal jurisdiction under Rule 12(b)(2).

We reported the two motions when they landed and, before that, the 21-day clock that produced them. This is the reply to both.

What are Drake and Adin Ross arguing?

The dispute is narrow and it is not about whether Stake.us did anything wrong. It is about whether a New Mexico federal court can hear claims against two people who live elsewhere.

Drake and Ross say no. We read both sworn declarations rather than relying on the brief's rendering of them. Drake's, at paragraph 7, says he has "never directed, tailored, or targeted any Stake.us-related promotional content specifically to New Mexico residents or the New Mexico market", and at paragraph 8 that he never created such content "with the intention or understanding that it would be used to advertise Stake.us specifically to New Mexico customers or within the state of New Mexico". Ross's wording is near-identical.

The plaintiffs' answer is that nationwide saturation is not a defence. The brief opens by framing the question this way:

This case presents a straightforward but consequential question: whether Defendants - who profit from promoting an illegal online gambling platform to millions of users nationwide, including in New Mexico - can evade accountability in this forum by disclaiming any intent to target the state. They cannot.

And later, more bluntly:

That Defendants saturate social media sites so that there is not a jurisdiction unaffected by their conduct does not somehow insulate them from accountability in any of them.

Legally the brief leans on two older cases: Keeton v. Hustler Magazine, where circulating a national magazine into a state was enough, and the Ninth Circuit's Mavrix Photo, which held that a website with national reach that "appeals to, and profits from, an audience in a particular state" can be said to have expressly aimed at it.

What did Drake's declaration leave out?

One line that Ross's declaration carries and Drake's does not. The brief notes that the two declarations are near-copies of each other, then says:

It is also noteworthy that while Defendants' declarations are substantially verbatim, Drake declines to adopt Ross's representation that he has no employees or agents in New Mexico - raising the obvious likelihood that he does.

We checked that against the declarations themselves rather than taking the brief's word for it, and the omission is real. Ross's declaration devotes a standalone paragraph 6 to it: "I do not have any employees or agents in the state of New Mexico." Drake's runs to eight paragraphs and never uses the word "employee" at all. His paragraph 5 rules out an office, mailing address, bank account, phone number and registered agent in the state, then goes straight to his content in paragraph 6, skipping the line Ross included.

What the plaintiffs draw from that gap, "raising the obvious likelihood that he does", is argument rather than evidence. The absence is a fact; the inference is untested, and no court has ruled on it.

The brief makes a second structural argument that does not depend on any inference. Drake and Ross have separately asked the court to send the case to arbitration as third-party beneficiaries of the terms the players accepted in New Mexico. The opposition says they cannot have it both ways:

But Drake and Ross cannot argue that they had no contacts with New Mexico in one motion while seeking the benefits of their contract-related contacts with New Mexico in another.

What do the interrogatories actually ask for?

This is the part with teeth, because it asks two influencers to hand over the geography of their own audience. Exhibit 1 runs to 22 pages and has two halves: 19 numbered interrogatories, then 15 separate requests for production of documents. Among the questions:

• No. 6 - all analytics or data either man has on the geographic location of viewers of his Stake content, "including but not limited to viewership statistics from New Mexico".
• No. 7 - every method used to track or analyse where viewers are, across every platform.
• No. 10 - the number of New Mexico viewers or followers who engaged with Stake content on Kick, YouTube, Instagram and X.
• No. 12 and No. 13 - every promo code and referral link given to followers, whether those links track location, and "the number of Persons from New Mexico, who have used Your promotional codes or referral links on Stake, and the total value of their gambling activities".
• No. 3 - the contract with Stake itself: start date, compensation terms, promotional requirements, and "any territorial restrictions or target audience specifications".
• No. 11 - what steps, if any, either man took to stop New Mexico residents seeing the content.

The 15 document requests run along the same line, and one of them is pointed. Request No. 7 asks for "Documents relating to any real estate you own in New Mexico" - which is the thread Ross pulled himself when his September declaration disclosed that a consultant bought him a New Mexico property in February 2026. Request No. 5 asks for documents on any travel either man has made to the state, and No. 6 for any business ownership physically located there.

The brief is candid about why it wants all of this: "Without discovery, Plaintiffs cannot conclusively quantify Defendants' customer base, sales volume, and revenue in New Mexico." The fallback request is that the judge defer ruling on the dismissal motions until that discovery is done.

How does this fit the rest of the Stake.us litigation?

New Mexico is one of several parallel cases, and the influencer-jurisdiction question is what makes this one and Missouri distinct. Elsewhere the fight has been about arbitration.

Two things follow for a reader. First, the court has not set a hearing on the September 7 motions, so there is no date to watch yet. Second, if the judge grants the interrogatories, the answers would be the first public numbers anyone has produced on how sweeps traffic actually moves from a livestream into a state - which is why this procedural skirmish is worth more attention than most.

What does this mean for a Stake.us player today?

Nothing you need to do. There is no settlement, no fund, no claim form and no deadline anywhere in this case. Anyone offering you a "Stake.us payout claim" is ahead of the record, and we would treat that as a reason to close the tab.

Where Stake.us sits in our rankings is on the Stake.us review, why it carries a caution flag instead of a top-ten place is set out on our list of casinos to approach carefully, what New Mexico law says about all of this is on the New Mexico state page, and the operators where we have actually completed a redemption are on our ranked list of sweepstakes casinos.

Sources & documents

• CourtListener docket, Torres v. Sweepsteaks Limited, No. 1:25-cv-01292 (D.N.M.) - read September 23, 2026; 28 entries, the source of the entry numbers, dates and labels in the table above
• Plaintiffs' opposition brief, ECF 28, filed September 21, 2026 - 14 pages, the source of every quotation in this article
• Plaintiffs' Exhibit 1, ECF 28-1, filed September 21, 2026 - 22 pages, the 19 proposed jurisdictional interrogatories and 15 requests for production
• Declaration of Aubrey Drake Graham, ECF 26-1 and Declaration of Adin Ross, ECF 27-1 - both filed September 7, 2026, read September 23, 2026; the source of the paragraph-by-paragraph comparison and of the missing employees-and-agents line
• District of New Mexico electronic filing feed - the court's own entry list, checked as an independent confirmation of the docket read

This piece reports filings on a public federal docket. The allegations described here are one side's contentions, they are denied, and no court has found any of them true.

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