Meet Thomas, a 35-year-old who got hooked to FanDuel and DraftKings in the pandemic, ended up $50,000 in the red. He filed for bankruptcy and signed up for a Pennsylvania registry that banned him from using betting apps. More recently, he saw an ad for Kalshi offering a cash bonus. He got the app and couldn’t put it down. He’s now living with his mom and grandmother and taking loans from them to afford food and car insurance payments. “I have a gambling addiction” he wrote to Kalshi, begging for them to ban him, which they eventually did. But not before he was more than $25,000 in the hole. Thomas represents dark side of the prediction market boom: Problem gamblers who relapse with Kalshi, which has blanketed TV, social media, sports stadiums, bus stations, trains, with ads trying to attract new traders, just as they insist they are not a gambling operator. That means they don’t honor “self-exclusion” registries maintained by states like Pennsylvania. Mental health clinicians say that creates a loophole for people like Thomas. What really got Thomas were Kalshi’s 15-minute crypto markets, where you can make a binary trade on whether Bitcoin will be above or below a certain number every 15 minutes. There were times he was betting 18 hours a day in these markets. He told me: “The odds flip so quickly. It’s such a rush. And when I’d lose, my brain just kept wanting to win it back. I never even traded Bitcoin or any crypto, but I just kept coming back to the rush of how unpredictable the markets were.” A clinician I spoke to called 15-minute crypto markets “a slot machine in your pocket” npr.org/2026/10/02/nx-s1-598…