A South Carolina law firm has sued Polymarket and DraftKings under a civil-recovery statute that dates to 1712, using a clause that lets any resident of the state collect money that total strangers lost on the platforms, then keep a cut for himself. Motley Rice filed the case in Charleston County Court on July 29, 2026, on behalf of James M. Hughes, a Charleston County resident who says he has never placed a trade on either platform.
That is the point of the provision Hughes is using. South Carolina Code Section 32-1-10 lets anyone who loses $50 or more on a game of chance sue the winner directly, within three months, to get the money back. Section 32-1-20, the one behind this case, applies only if that original loser never sues: it lets any other resident step in instead and recover triple the amount, split evenly between the plaintiff and the county where the money changed hands. Hughes was never a customer of either platform. He is suing as that other resident.
A rule written for card tables, aimed at an order book
Both sections trace back to England's 1710 Statute of Anne, which made large gaming debts unenforceable and let losers claw the money back from winners instead of the state prosecuting anyone. South Carolina kept a version of it long after most states repealed theirs, and courts here have used it against everything from illegal card rooms to unlicensed casino nights. Hughes' complaint is the first attempt to point it at a prediction-market exchange.
The complaint's argument is not about odds or probability at all; it is about the label. Polymarket and DraftKings Predictions sell contracts that pay out based on who wins a sporting event, and South Carolina law does not distinguish that from a sports wager just because the contract clears through an exchange instead of a bookmaker's counter. Sports wagering itself is illegal in South Carolina, one of 11 states with no legal market of any kind, so Hughes' lawyers argue the "sports event contract" label the platforms use, to claim federal, CFTC-style oversight instead of state gaming law, does not hold up.
Motley Rice attorney T. David Hoyle put it more bluntly in the filing: the platforms' "rhetorical set dressing of 'prediction markets' and event contracts doesn't change reality," and "defendants incite, offer, and collect winnings from illegal wagers placed by South Carolinians on the outcome of sporting events."
A longer list of defendants than the two names in the headline
The complaint does not stop at the two platforms. It also names CME and Crypto.com as exchange and clearing partners, along with several unnamed market makers that supply the liquidity behind the trades, arguing the whole chain profits from money state law says should never have changed hands this way. The remedy Hughes wants is not his own money; it is triple whatever South Carolina residents lost on the platforms, split between him and the counties where it happened.
A different fight than Minnesota's
It is a different route than the one playing out elsewhere. Minnesota tried to criminalize prediction-market trading outright, and a federal judge blocked that law days before it took effect, ruling the contracts were preempted by federal commodities law, not state authority. France's regulator skipped courts entirely and ordered the country's internet providers to block Polymarket at the network level. Hughes' case takes neither road: it does not ask a regulator or a legislature to act, and it does not test federal preemption. It asks a Charleston County jury to apply a law almost as old as the state itself to accounts most of the people who funded them never chose to sue over.
Whether a rule written for 18th-century card rooms reaches a modern digital order book is now that jury's question, not a regulator's.
