New Lawsuit Alleges Drake & Adin Ross Misled Fans into Gambling

Photo Credit: Aidan Howe

Drake, Adin Ross, DJ Akademiks, and gambling website Stake.us have been named in a series of illegal gambling and racketeering lawsuits.

Drake, streamer Adin Ross, and DJ Akademiks have been named alongside gambling website Stake.us in an illegal gambling and racketeering lawsuit filed in New Jersey on April 22. The suit echoes similar filings involving Drake and Ross in Missouri, New Mexico, Virginia, and Ohio.

Each of the lawsuits involves people who claim to have lost money on Stake.us, with allegations that the online casino violates state gambling regulations. Specifically, in the New Jersey suit, the state notably passed legislation in August last year that made it no longer legal to join or participate in a sweepstakes casino.

Jason Nufio of Roselle, New Jersey, alleges that Drake, Ross, and Akademiks have all used their celebrity status to promote Stake.us while obfuscating their deals with the platform. Like the other lawsuits, Nufio claims that Stake financed a scheme to inflate Drake’s streaming numbers.

For his part, Akademiks—whose real name is Livingston Allen—is accused of “knowingly and directly” assisting Drake’s inflation of his streaming numbers through bot networks “by publishing and promoting information that he knew to be false,” while being paid through Stake’s tipping feature.

Nufio’s lawsuit further asserts that ads for Stake “concealed the fact that Drake and Ross faced no genuine financial risk, while ordinary consumers who followed their lead and placed similar wagers stood to lose real money.”

The lawsuit also claims that Stake uses virtual currency as a “fig leaf to superficially avoid the appearance of illegal gambling,” which the filing claims affords the platform a “veneer of deniability.”

The latest suit follows a class action filed in Missouri against Drake, while a lawsuit against Stake and streaming platform Kick (where Ross streams, which is also owned by Stake founders) was filed last August in California. Meanwhile, also in August, Drake accused Stake of repeatedly blocking him from withdrawing funds, which led to him ultimately closing his Kick account.