He asked to be locked out. The app offered a trading break.

On October 2, NPR told the story of Thomas, a 35-year-old finance worker in Pennsylvania. He lives in his childhood home with his grandmother and his mother, a grocery store cashier. Not long ago he had to ask them both for a loan to cover a week of food and a car insurance payment. "It's hard to ask to borrow money because I spent everything I have on Kalshi," he said.

Sports betting left him about $75,000 in debt and in bankruptcy by late 2023, so he banned himself from DraftKings and FanDuel. Two years later an Instagram ad offered a $20 bonus for his first $10 on Kalshi. It's a prediction market supervised by federal officials, so the state ban lists don't reach it. "Betting $10 became a couple hundred, and that became a couple hundred more, then thousands more," he said. He lost more than $25,000.

The loan from his family shamed him enough that he wanted out. He opened the app's chat and wrote: "I asked a live agent to close my account. I have a gambling addiction and have been self-excluded from regulated gambling platforms for years." The automated reply called self-exclusion "designed to be irreversible" and offered him a "trading break" instead. He sent three more requests by email before Kalshi barred him.

Jesus told his disciples that occasions of stumbling will always come, and then he looked past the one who falls to the one the stumble comes through.

In verse 2 he adds that such a person would be better off in the sea with a millstone around his neck. That is the charge Kalshi is answering when its spokeswoman, Dani Lever, calls Thomas "a cherry-picked case" and says the company's "profits aren't tied to trader losses." The woe in Luke falls on whoever the stumble came through, whatever the business model, and for Thomas it came through an ad with cash attached. A safer gate was possible, too. On September 30, Polymarket, Kalshi's main rival, began letting users lock themselves out for a year or for life.

The same short speech doesn't let Thomas off, though. In verses 3 and 4 Jesus turns to a brother who sins, and the sin still counts as his. So does the way back: if he sins seven times in a day and returns each time to say he repents, he is to be forgiven. Thomas sounds like that brother when he admits he spent everything he had, and when he asks four times to be shut out. He asked in plain words, and a machine answered with a menu. The text holds the man who falls to account and keeps the door open for his return. Its harder word is for whoever set a $20 bonus in front of a man who had already fenced himself off.