Stake.us Adds Indiana and Maine to Restricted States List

Stake.us bars players from 22 states, Indiana and Maine among them, on the help-centre article it files under restricted states, and from 20 states, with Indiana and Maine absent, on a welcome article stamped 13 days later. Both were live when we read them on September 13, 2026, and the longer list is the older one.

Start with the newer document, because a reader landing on the welcome article is the one most likely to act on it. "Stake.us - Social Casino" carries a July 23, 2026 stamp and describes the product as designed "for all players from the US with the exception of the States of Washington, New York, Nevada, Kentucky, Idaho, Michigan, Vermont, Connecticut, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Montana, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, California and Illinois." Count them: 20.

Now the article the help centre files under Account and Verification. "Restricted states on the platform", stamped July 10, 2026, says Stake.us is "currently unable to accommodate players from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Maine, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia - due to the regulations of the mentioned states." That is 22, and the two extra names are Indiana and Maine, both of which our state-by-state legality matrix files as banned.

The older list is the longer one. That is the wrong way round for a document set that is meant to be kept current, and it is the reason a Maine or Indiana player reading the welcome page is told nothing is wrong.

When did Stake.us add Illinois, Indiana and Maine?

The restricted-states article has nine captures in the Internet Archive, and three of them date the additions. We pulled each one rather than trusting the operator's own "updated" label.

Nothing has ever been removed. California and Tennessee went on by the March 2026 capture, Illinois on or before May 19, Indiana and Maine by July 10, and not one of the five has come off since. Across eleven months the list only grows, which is what an operator retreating state by state looks like from the outside.

Indiana's enrolled act would not serve to us today. The Legislature's document server answered nine attempts across four document paths with the same 691-byte application shell instead of a PDF, so for Indiana we rely on our Indiana state page and the reporting behind it rather than a fresh read.

What does Maine's online sweepstakes ban say?

Maine is the one we can put a statute against. We pulled the enrolled Act from the Legislature's own server today: S.P. 825, L.D. 2007, "An Act Regarding the Prohibition of Online Sweepstakes Games", approved by the Governor on April 6, 2026 as Chapter 645. It enacts a new chapter titled "ONLINE SWEEPSTAKES GAMES PROHIBITED", and section 1352 is blunt about who is exposed: "A person that operates or promotes an online sweepstakes game or supports the operation or promotion of an online sweepstakes game commits a civil violation", with a fine "of not less than $10,000 and not more than $100,000."

The Act does not stop at a civil fine, which is the part worth knowing. Section 3 enacts a new subsection 1-B of 17-A MRSA section 954, Maine's unlawful gambling statute, under which a person "is guilty of unlawful gambling if the person operates or promotes an online sweepstakes game or supports the operation or promotion of an online sweepstakes game." Section 1352 then provides for revocation of a licensee's license on conviction under it. The Act does not restate a crime class, because that sits in the existing unlawful gambling statute rather than in this text, so we are not putting a number on the criminal exposure. The civil and criminal routes both run at operators and promoters, not at players.

Why is Illinois on the list with no ban behind it?

Illinois is the interesting one, because it is the only addition with no ban behind it. Our Illinois page records a state that never passed a sweepstakes statute and whose Gaming Board went at the sector with letters instead, and our report on who received an Illinois cease-and-desist letter found none filed under any of the seven spellings of Stake.us we tried. The board's own server would not resolve for us today, so that account stands on our August read. We can date the addition better than the capture, though: the June 5 page carries a machine-readable dateModified of May 19, 2026, so Illinois went on the list on or before that day. That is three and a half months after the board's February 2026 letter campaign and eleven weeks before we went through its files. Whatever prompted the move, it was not a letter we have been able to find.

What does Stake.us tell a player whose state gets added?

Nothing that we can find. Its help centre runs 90 articles, and not one of them is a state notice, a wind-down schedule or a redemption deadline. We searched the full sitemap for anything about states, restrictions, closures or balances and got five articles back, of which the restricted-states page is the only one that mentions a state at all.

That absence has a cost, and it is easiest to see next to an operator that does publish one. When Pulsz switched Oklahoma to Gold Coins only, it did it in a dated help article, and its earlier Indiana move came with a deadline attached, which is the record we drew on for Pulsz's Oklahoma switch. VGW's state exits ran on published windows too, between 14 and 57 days depending on the state, which we set out in our comparison of those exit windows. Stake.us has published no window for any of the five states it has added since October.

Two more things its own documents do say. "Redeeming Rewards" refers to "the redemption minimum" without ever printing a figure, so there is no published floor to hold it to. And "How to close your account?" warns that closing an account "will limit access to it as well as the right to use, enjoy or benefit from any Gold Coins, Stake Cash and unredeemed Prizes associated with it." That is about voluntary closure rather than a state exit, and we are not stretching it further than that, but it is the only sentence in the help centre that addresses what happens to a balance when access ends.

The article that names 22 states tells you to "refer to Section 2.1 in our Terms and Conditions" for detail. We cannot. Every path on stake.us returns HTTP 403 to us, including /policies/terms, /policies/sweepstakes-rules and an invented address we made up as a control, all three roughly 5.4KB of the same refusal. So the binding document is unreadable from here, and the two help articles are the whole public record. If they disagree, a player has no third source to break the tie.

What does this change on our own Stake.us pages?

Our numbers are wrong, and the fix matters more than the article does. Our Stake.us review tells readers the brand is unavailable in "roughly 18 states" and then lists them, and our brand database carries the same 18 codes with a verification date of July 27, 2026. That is seventeen days after Stake.us edited its own list to 22. Illinois, Indiana, Maine and Tennessee are missing from ours, and every one of them is on the operator's.

The consequence is not cosmetic. That field drives the gate that hides a brand's clickout from readers in the states it excludes, so with Illinois absent from our record, an Illinois reader is not gated off a Stake.us link at all. Indiana, Maine and Tennessee are treated as banned states here and carry no affiliate links on their own pages, but the review copy still under-counts them. The August table in our Illinois report carries a Stake.us row reading "No" under the heading "Excludes Illinois (our brand database)". That cell is an accurate report of our database rather than a mistake in the table, which is exactly the problem: fix the database and the cell turns over on its own. All of it is flagged for the owner rather than edited here, because the exclusion list also feeds State Coverage scoring and the ranking ladder on our ranked list of sweepstakes casinos.

If you are in any of the four, the practical answer is the same whichever document you believe: do not put money into a Stake.us balance you may not be able to get out. Our cash-out speed rankings cover brands whose floors and timelines are published, our guide to where sweepstakes casinos are legal sets out which states have acted, and the document-first method we apply to every brand is why we read both of these pages instead of one.

Sources & documents

• Stake.us, "Restricted states on the platform" - the 22-state list, machine-readable dateModified of July 10, 2026
• Stake.us, "Stake.us - Social Casino" - the 20-state list, dateModified of July 23, 2026
• Archive capture, October 13, 2025, March 7, 2026 and June 5, 2026 - 17, 19 and 20 states
• Stake.us help-centre sitemap - 90 articles with per-article timestamps, no state notice among them
• Stake.us, "Redeeming Rewards", "Redemption progress" and "How to close your account?"
• Maine L.D. 2007, Chapter 645 Public Law - approved April 6, 2026, enacting 8 MRSA c. 38 and section 1352, and adding subsection 1-B to the unlawful gambling statute at 17-A MRSA section 954
• stake.us/policies/terms - HTTP 403 to us, as is every other path on the domain including an invented control address

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