INTERVIEW
Interview with Cole Wogoman, NCPG
Director of Government Relations and
League Partnerships
Player safety in a prediction‑platform grey zone
Interview with Cole Wogoman
Our editor spoke with Cole Wogoman, Director of Government Relations and League Partnerships at the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG), about what prediction platforms look like when you focus on player safety rather than product labels.
He explains why NCPG considers many event‑based futures “functionally gambling” from a harm perspective and why, in his view, any platform offering that experience should meet the same basic safeguards as regulated sportsbetting.
Cole Wogoman, Director of Government Relations & League Partnerships at the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) Photo courtesy of NCPG
Box-out: Cole Wogoman
Current title: Director of Government Relations & League Partnerships
Organisation: National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) – ncpgambling.org
Background: Licensed attorney based in Washington, DC, advocating for NCPG’s legislative agenda on problem gambling and responsible gambling at federal, state, and local levels, and acting as liaison to NCPG’s sports‑league members. Before joining NCPG in 2021, he served as legislative counsel to D.C. Council member Mary Cheh on issues including sports gambling, following earlier work as an associate at law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher.
Setting the scene
Our editor spoke with NCPG director of Government Relations & League Partnerships, Cole Wogoman, about how the National Council on Problem Gambling views prediction platforms and why they have become part of its public‑health focus. He explains that the National Council on Problem Gambling, founded in 1972 by people affected by gambling problems and their allies, is the only national US nonprofit devoted solely to reducing the social and economic costs of gambling addiction and is explicitly neutral on gambling.
NCPG’s membership spans people with lived experience, treatment providers, lotteries, gambling operators such as FanDuel and DraftKings, professional sports leagues including the NFL and MLB, regulators, and state public‑health agencies. Once a year these groups meet at NCPG’s annual national conference, which gives them a rare opportunity to be in the same room, listen to each other and work on shared approaches to earlier detection and better cooperation – the kind of cross‑stakeholder dialogue that addiction researcher Dr Mark Griffiths also highlighted in his interview with iGaming Review, “38 Years of Gambling and Behavioural Addiction Research”.
Cole himself worked for the Council of the District of Columbia when sports betting was being legalised, an experience that helped shape his view that gambling‑related harm should be approached as a public‑health issue: most people will never develop a problem, but for some it becomes an addiction with serious and often hidden consequences. “I’m passionate about reducing the stigma around problem gambling,” he says, noting that gambling disorder is now formally recognised as an addiction in the United States, alongside other mental‑health diagnoses.
Neutral on legalisation, not neutral on regulation
When we move to prediction markets, I ask Cole about prevention: what matters most if regulators such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are going to act.
He comes back to a line he also uses with lawmakers: “NCPG is neutral on legalisation,but not neutral on regulation.” In its letter to CFTC, NCPG wrote that, putting aside whether futures contracts legally constitute gambling, from a problem‑gambling standpoint for many customers betting on futures is functionally gambling.
Cole notes that many prediction platforms present themselves as trading or information venues rather than gambling operators and therefore consider themselves outside the remit of state gambling regulators. NCPG maintains its neutral stance on legalisation and legal definitions, but points out that this activity is currently taking place outside the responsible‑gambling safeguards that many states now require of licensed sports‑betting operators – tools to stop or limit losses, easy access to statistics on wins, losses and time spent, and prominent information about the national helpline. “Now it is like the Wild West. The federal government should either regulate it or allow states to regulate it.” Cole says.
For him, that is the core of the regulatory grey zone: behaviour that looks and feels like gambling for many users, without the gambling‑grade protections that now exist elsewhere in online betting.
Crypto Wallets could be a way for minors under 21 to access prediction markets.
Polymarket, crypto wallets and early signs
When I ask if he can see specific data and an increase due to prediction markets, Cole says it is too early to have analyzed solid evidence. However, he has heard from counsellors that “you can access Polymarket with a crypto wallet when you are under 18 years of age,” which he finds worrying. Cole is careful to keep this at the level of what counselors are reporting, not as a formal study.
But when he combines those stories with the broader research on early gambling, online sports betting and young men, he comes back to NCPG’s standpoint: from a problem‑gambling standpoint, for many customers betting on these futures is functionally gambling, and regulators should take that into account rather than waiting for more severe cases to accumulate.
Internet Responsible Gambling Standards / and the CFTC roundtable
To summarise what he would like CFTC to apply beyond helplines and age, Cole points to NCPG’s Internet Responsible Gambling Standards document, which regulators and operators can use as a template. The Internet Responsible Gambling Standards are a set of voluntary best‑practice guidelines developed by the National Council on Problem Gambling to shape how online gambling is designed and operated.
They are written primarily for online gambling operators, but are also intended to be used by regulators, platform providers and other stakeholders as a reference point when setting or assessing player‑protection requirements. Updated in December 2023, the standards exist to reduce gambling‑related harm by embedding consumer protection into governance, staff training, player information, in‑product tools, marketing, game design, and continuous testing and evaluation across internet‑based gambling services.
For prediction platforms, he highlights a few points in particular: clear access to personal play history – amounts wagered, won and lost, and time spent; limit‑setting tools for money and time, ideally set at account registration; easy‑to‑use time‑out and self‑exclusion options, with follow‑up information on blocking tools, treatment and recovery resources; and ensuring that all external links to treatment and support services are up to date and regularly tested.
In 2025, the CFTC asked for comments on prediction markets and announced plans for a roundtable on the topic, and NCPG responded with a letter introducing its “functionally gambling” language and these practical suggestions.
The roundtable was later cancelled and, at the time of our interview, had not been rescheduled, which means the questions he raises about helplines, age and standards remain open.
The grey zone of missing regulation in predicition markets.
Regulation, growth – and a missing corner of the triangle
Since sports betting was legalised in 2018, NCPG’s NGAGE surveys have tracked changes in gambling attitudes and experiences in the US over time, rather than measuring addiction prevalence directly.
Between the first NGAGE survey in 2018 and NGAGE 2.0 in 2021, indicators of potentially problematic play rose. NGAGE 3.0, conducted in 2024, shows that those indicators have since eased back and returned to roughly the same overall range as in 2018, below the peak observed in 2021.
In Cole’s view, the most important signal across all three waves is the sizeable at‑risk group among people who gamble, with age, gender and breadth of gambling activity emerging as key correlates of harm, and young men aged 18–30 consistently more likely to report risky or harmful behaviours than other groups.
The leagues have also donated to NCPG to try to decrease gambling problems and promote responsible gambling, which Cole puts simply: “Anyone who profits of gambling has an obligation to donate and help, and the overall footprint of gambling has expanded in all the big leagues.”
To describe how responsibility should be shared, he uses a triangle. At one point sits the individual, who has to want help and engage with it. In another sits the operator, which holds all the data and can see when patterns change – more nightly play, more frequent bets, higher stakes, and so on. In the third sits the regulator, which sets how the operator should protect the client from the potential risk of gambling addiction.
“In prediction markets, the regulator is now a grey spot, or you could say there is no regulator” in the sense of a body that sets player‑protection rules in the way state gambling regulators do for sportsbooks, he says.
That gap is what worries him most as these platforms grow. “The gambling operator has all the data when you bet,” he adds. “They can see when patterns change, such as nightly, more frequent bets, higher bets and so on. So there is a good chance to spot risk early.”
He ends the interview with a sentence that could apply equally to prediction platforms and traditional betting: “Gambling addiction is easy to hide until it’s impossible to hide.” For Cole, the question for regulators is whether they act while prediction‑platform problems are still relatively hidden – or wait until that impossibility arrives.
Further Reading & Key Sources
Laurence Steinberg (2008), A Social Neuroscience Perspective on Adolescent Risk‑Taking
John W. Welte et al. (2012), The Relationship Between Age of Gambling Onset and Adolescent Problem Gambling
National Council on Problem Gambling (2021), National Survey on Gambling Attitudes and Gambling Experiences (NGAGE) – National Detailed Report
National Council on Problem Gambling (2024), NGAGE 3.0 (2024) – Key Findings on Gambling Risk and Online Sports Betting
