On Thursday (July 30), US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia granted a motion to compel arbitration filed by Sweepsteaks Ltd., the operator of online casino platform Stake.us, staying the entire case pending the outcome of that arbitration. The ruling, which Rolling Stone obtained in full, means the proposed class action brought by eight Stake.us users accusing Drake, streamer Adin Ross, George Nguyen, and streaming platform Kick of operating an illegal gambling scheme and funding a “bot army” to inflate Drake’s streams will not proceed in public court, at least for now. Claims against Drake personally remain technically alive but are stayed indefinitely until the Stake arbitration concludes. The ruling does not dismiss any of the allegations or decide whether any of the defendants did what the plaintiffs claim.
The lawsuit, filed December 31, 2025, was brought by LaShawnna Ridley, Tiffany Hines, and six other Stake.us users on behalf of a proposed nationwide class. The complaint alleged that Drake “deployed automated bots and streaming farms to artificially inflate play counts of his music,” financed through his $100 million annual Stake.us endorsement arrangement, and that Stake, Ross, and Nguyen participated in concealing the scheme from consumers who lost money on the platform. Stake.us denied the claims categorically, with a spokesperson telling outlets the platform “does not have a tipping function that could be used in this way” and calling the lawsuit “a nonsense claim.” Drake did not publicly respond to the allegations. As Billboard reported, none of the three individual defendants, Drake, Ross, or Nguyen, had been served with the lawsuit as of the ruling date.
Judge Brinkema’s decision turned on a procedural question rather than the merits of the underlying claims. Stake.us’s terms of service require users to bring disputes through individual arbitration and waive the right to participate in class actions, with a 30-day opt-out window. None of the eight plaintiffs opted out. Brinkema found the arbitration clause “unambiguous” and enforceable, noting that four earlier lawsuits against Stake had reached the same conclusion on the same terms. The plaintiffs had argued that even if Stake was sent to arbitration, their claims against Drake, Ross, Nguyen, and Kick should proceed separately in court. Brinkema rejected that position, finding that any liability those defendants might face “would be directly affected by the results of the arbitration,” and that proceeding separately risked inconsistent outcomes. The entire case was removed from the active docket, and a previously scheduled August 14 hearing was canceled. The plaintiffs and Stake were ordered to begin arbitration promptly and file a status report within 120 days.
The procedural outcome is a temporary win for Drake, but the streaming manipulation questions circling him are not going away. In June 2026, a California federal judge dismissed a separate proposed class action brought by rapper RBX that accused Spotify of allowing billions of fake streams to inflate Drake’s play counts between January 2022 and September 2025. Drake was not named as a defendant in that suit and was not accused of wrongdoing, but as FTM reported when Drake dropped his three-album rollout, he remains Spotify’s most-streamed artist of all time and became the first act to pass 120 billion streams on the service in September 2025. The volume of his streaming figures has made them a recurring focus of litigation even when he is not personally named.
