Gottheimer introduces bill requiring facial ID for prediction markets, online sportsbooks

Skip to content

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) introduced a bill Wednesday that would require prediction markets and online sportsbook to use facial recognition to verify users’ ages to avoid minors from placing bets or trading on platforms.

The New Jersey Democrat announced the bill alongside Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, who said he welcomed the proposal on top of the prediction market’s existing measures to keep kids off his platform.

The legislation, titled the Facial Recognition to Protect Children Act, would mandate the prediction markets and online sportsbooks to use facial recognition to verify a user’s age when logging onto the platform or before placing a wager. The technology must also “read facial structure and patterns to estimate a user’s age.”

“Right now, kids can too easily log into a parent’s or sibling’s account and bet real money,” Gottheimer said, adding that without a check, “we’re asking our kids to self-police their way past a system built entirely on the honor code.”

The bill has a number of cosponsors on both sides of the aisle, including Rep. Tom Souzzi (R-N.Y.), who was also present for the Wednesday announcement.

“Protecting kids should be a no brainer and is a top priority at Kalshi,” Tarek Mansour, CEO of Kalshi said in a release Wednesday. “Beyond what’s required of us, we already self-regulate and have a suite of measures in place to keep minors off our platform. But this can’t just be one company’s responsibility — it has to be an industry standard.”

The bill also has support from Parents Rise, a movement led by parents who lost their children to the harms of social media, which said in a statement they are pleased lawmakers “see the threat of this next wave of products engineered for compulsive use.”

The proposal is one of the first to specifically tackle online kids’ safety in prediction markets, which have surged in popularity over the past year. The industry has faced some pressure to explain what they are doing to prevent minors and those younger than 21 from using their platforms.

Kalshi released a kids’ online safety initiative earlier this year, making facial ID the default for users who already have it enabled on their phones. The company encouraged parents to use Kalshi with two-factor authentication to prevent their kids from accessing their account.

The company also launched a feature to allow users to check whether someone is logging in under their ID, in addition to requesting selfies “as an extra protection layer from higher-risk individuals.”

Tags

Josh Gottheimer

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.