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Maryland's largest city, whose Consumer Protection Ordinance is enforced by the City Solicitor and which used it on 13 August 2026 to sue Kalshi and Polymarket over sports event contracts, naming Robinhood, Webull and Coinbase alongside Kalshi as the brokers that sell the contracts and take a fee on each one.
Baltimore is a Maryland municipal corporation governed by a Mayor and City Council. Its legal work sits in the Baltimore City Law Department at City Hall, headed by the City Solicitor, who is appointed by the mayor, confirmed by the council, and sits on the Board of Estimates alongside the mayor, the council president, the comptroller and the director of public works. Ebony M. Thompson became deputy solicitor in January 2022, acting solicitor in January 2023 and was sworn in on 29 January 2024 after a unanimous confirmation vote; the city's own biography of her records that she championed a three-year pilot, approved in December 2023, to record Baltimore's vacant property deeds on a blockchain. The department's Affirmative Litigation Division brings the city's own claims rather than defending it, and Sara Gross is its chief. The consumer power used against the prediction markets is recent: Ordinance 23-266 repealed the old false advertising subtitle of article 2 of the Baltimore City Code and replaced it with subtitle 4, Unfair, Abusive, or Deceptive Trade Practices, which takes its definitions from title 13 of the Maryland Commercial Law Article, prohibits the practices it names in the sale or offer of consumer goods, realty and services, and gives the City Solicitor an investigation power, a subpoena power and a right to sue for injunctive relief and civil penalties. Gambling is a municipal interest as well as a legal one: the complaints record that Maryland authorises casino gaming only at a limited number of licensed facilities, of which Horseshoe Casino Baltimore is one, and that the public benefits of that framework reach the jurisdictions where the casinos sit.
Developments in which City of Baltimore is a named party, newest first.
The city filed two complaints in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City on 13 August under an ordinance of its own, and the Kalshi case also names Robinhood, Webull and Coinbase, because each takes a fee on every event contract sold through its…
The city filed two complaints in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City on 13 August 2026 under its Consumer Protection Ordinance. The Kalshi case also names Robinhood, Webull and Coinbase, pleading that each takes a fee alongside Kalshi on every event contract bought through its prediction markets hub, and seeks penalties, an injunction, disgorgement and restitution.
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