Support will not respond: five escalation routes exist, and only one of them can order your money back

If an exchange has stopped answering you, the honest starting point is that this is common and mostly unpunished. The strongest number in our corpus on this is a Better Business Bureau complaint record in which 174 of 214 complaints closed with no response from the business, which is 81%, and we set out below why we are not attaching that record to a named venue. Five escalation routes sit above the support ticket: the BBB, the CFTC's tips-and-complaints door, the CFTC reparations forum, your state attorney general, and NFA arbitration. Only reparations can order a respondent to pay you damages, its non-refundable filing fee is $50, $125 or $250 depending on the size of the claim, and the statute limits it to respondents registered under the Commodity Exchange Act, which is not the same status an exchange holds. That last point is the one nobody writes down, and it is where most of these complaints die.

The five rungs, and what each one can actually do

Read that column again. Most of those rows cannot make anyone pay you. They are pressure, publicity and enforcement referral, which is a different product from a claim for damages.

The rung that pays is the rung least likely to reach your exchange

CFTC reparations is a real, working forum. The Commission describes it as "an inexpensive, expeditious, and fair forum to resolve disputes between derivatives customers and registered trading professionals", and cases are decided by CFTC administrative judges specialising in commodity derivatives law.

The phrase "registered trading professionals" is doing the work. The statute behind the forum is Section 14 of the Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. § 18, and its respondent test is registration: a complaint runs against "any person who is registered under this chapter". The CFTC's own eligibility page puts the same test first, telling you to find out whether the individual or firm in your complaint "was registered with the CFTC at the time of the alleged wrongdoing or at the time the complaint is filed". The statutory text does not name a board of trade, a contract market or an exchange as a possible respondent.

A designated contract market holds a different status. A DCM is a board of trade or exchange operating under CFTC oversight pursuant to Section 5 of the CEA, 7 USC 7, and it holds that designation by complying with twenty-three Core Principles set out in Section 5(d) and detailed in Part 38 of the Commission's regulations. Designation as an exchange and registration as a trading professional are not the same category. Both venues most people are asking about are DCMs:

• Kalshi. Kalshi's own help centre says it "is regulated as a Designated Contract Market (DCM), which is a financial exchange designated to trade futures, swaps, and or options on commodities". That article names no legal entity and describes no customer dispute route at all. We hold a CFTC rule filing for KalshiEX LLC, but its text was not extractable, so the entity relationship is not quoted from the filing.
• Polymarket US. We hold the URL of a CFTC Amended Order of Designation for the venue behind Polymarket US. We downloaded that order on 19 August 2026 and could not extract text from the PDF, so neither the entity name nor the designation is quoted from the order itself.

So if your dispute is with the exchange itself, on the statutory respondent test, reparations appears not to reach it. If a registered intermediary such as a futures commission merchant sits between you and the exchange, it does, because an FCM is registered under the Act. Most retail prediction-market accounts are held directly with the venue with nobody registered in between, which is the configuration the forum was not designed around.

This is our reading of the statute and the published pages, not a ruling. We have found no CFTC statement saying in terms that a DCM cannot be a reparations respondent. The Office of Proceedings publishes a phone number and an email address on the reparations index page, and asking them is the only way to settle it. It sits on the unverified list below, alongside the respondent-category list an earlier draft of this page published and we have since removed as unreadable at source.

The complaint you cannot file: Kalshi's maker fee has no settled published position

The strongest fee complaint you can make on any rung is "the fee charged does not match the published schedule", because it is checkable by both sides and it does not depend on anyone believing you. It only works where a published schedule exists. On fee schedule version 2026-08-04.a:

• Polymarket makers are never charged. The maker fee is zero. Zero, not a discount. Taker fees are published by category: 0.07 crypto, 0.05 sports, economics, culture, weather and other, 0.04 finance, politics, mentions and tech, and 0.00 geopolitical, applied as rate x C x P x (1 - P). A mismatch here is a checkable complaint.
• Kalshi's taker fee is published, on docs.kalshi.com, as roundup(0.07 x C x P x (1 - P)), with sub-penny rounding and a whole-cent rebate accumulator. A mismatch here is a checkable complaint too.
• Kalshi's maker fee is not settled, and the contradiction is Kalshi's own. Their newsroom says resting orders are fee-exempt. Their help centre says maker fees are charged. Nobody has reconciled the two publicly. So if you are charged on a resting order, there is no single published position to measure the charge against: there are two, and they disagree with each other.

Our scanner has to put a number somewhere in order to run, so it carries KALSHI_MAKER_RATE = 0.0175 in scanner/fees.py, applied in the same quadratic form as the taker rate. That coefficient is our own working assumption, not a Kalshi rate. Kalshi does not publish it, we have not verified it against any primary source, and we are not presenting it as a fact about the exchange. It is in this section only so you know what our own tools do and can discount it accordingly.

This changes what you should do first. Before you escalate a maker-fee charge to any rung, ask support in writing which of the two published positions applies to your resting order, and the exact rate and formula applied to the specific fill. You are not asking for a refund at that stage. You are asking them to state a position in writing, because while the documentation contradicts itself no outside body can check the charge at all. That written answer is the document every rung above needs, and it is worth more than the complaint you would file without it. Our workings are at /guides/kalshi-fee-math/ and /guides/maker-vs-taker/, and the calculators at /tools/kalshi-fee-calculator/ and /tools/polymarket-fee-calculator/ carry the same caveat inside them.

The CFTC has two front doors and they do different jobs

The tips-and-complaints door routes to the Division of Enforcement. You are a source of information, not a party. That page links the enforcement complaint form and cites Part 12 of the regulations, and it says nothing about what happens to your claim afterwards and promises nothing recovered for you. It is a report, not a remedy.

The reparations door is a claim. You allege that a registrant violated the CEA or CFTC regulations, you quantify your damages and explain how you calculated them, and a judge decides. That is the door with the fee, the deadline and the outcome. Confusingly, the same tips page cites Part 12 for both doors, so arriving at the right one is on you.

What reparations costs, how long you have, and the requirement that catches non-US traders

Three proceeding types, from the CFTC's own page, read 19 August 2026:

An appeal carries its own $50 filing fee. All three filing fees are non-refundable, which means a $125 filing is $125 spent whatever the outcome.

The deadline is two years. The statute allows a complaint "at any time within two years after the cause of action accrues", and the CFTC's own advisory phrases it as less than two years after the violation "or within two years of when you should have known about the violation". The six eligibility requirements, from the CFTC's eligibility page:

1. The individual or firm was registered with the CFTC at the time of the alleged wrongdoing or at the time the complaint is filed.
2. That individual or firm violated the Commodity Exchange Act or CFTC regulations.
3. You are not involved in other actions on the same claim, such as NFA arbitration or a civil court case.
4. The individuals or firms you name are not involved in a bankruptcy or receivership proceeding.
5. You submit a filing fee by check or money order, payable to the CFTC.
6. "If you are not a citizen of the United States, you may need to file a bond or waiver of bond before we can accept your complaint."

Requirement 6 matters more for this audience than almost any other. Our own keyword mapping records 84% of demand in this niche as non-US, and that is our figure from our own research rather than a platform disclosure. A bond of unpublished size sitting in front of a $125 claim is a practical bar, not a formality, and we have not found the amount or the waiver criteria published anywhere.

Requirement 3 has teeth too, and it interacts with a BBB rule further down: the BBB will not process a matter already settled in court or arbitration, and the CFTC will not hear a claim you are running in parallel elsewhere. The choice of rung is a choice, not a shotgun. Pick one, in order, and keep the dates.

The BBB is a publishing channel, not an enforcement channel

The BBB forwards your complaint and asks the business to respond within 14 calendar days from the date you filed the complaint. If no response arrives, a follow-up letter goes out and you are told the business did not respond. That is the whole of the published mechanism. Nothing in the process page describes any power to compel a business to do anything.

What it does do reliably is publish. Complaints remain visible on a BBB Business Profile for three years from the date the complaint was filed. That is the actual product: a dated, public, searchable record with the business's response or its silence attached to it.

It also declines several categories that are traps here, including matters already settled in court or arbitration, price dissatisfaction, buyer's remorse, and anonymous filings. "The market settled against me and the price was wrong" sits close enough to price dissatisfaction to be declined, so frame the concrete failure instead: funds not released, a ticket unanswered for a stated number of days, a fee that does not match the published schedule. If you cannot say which published schedule, see the maker-fee section above, because that is a different problem and it needs a different first move.

The 81% measures responsiveness, it has no denominator, and we cannot tell you whose profile it is

174 of 214 complaints in a Better Business Bureau record held in our corpus are closed with no response from the business. That is 81%.

Name what that is, because this is where these pages usually cheat. It counts complaints the business did not answer through the BBB channel. It is not a fraud rate, not a loss rate, and not a measure of how many problems were fixed elsewhere. A BBB complaint is a one-sided account by definition. It also has no denominator: neither venue publishes an active-trader count anywhere we have found, so 214 complaints cannot be turned into a per-user rate, and anyone converting it into one is inventing the bottom half of the fraction.

Two flags on that figure, both ours. The read date is not preserved in our notes and complaint counts move, so re-check it. More seriously, our notes do not record which platform's profile the count came from. Our own page at /kalshi/is-kalshi-legit/ attaches it to Kalshi; that attribution is not established in the underlying research note, our /glossary/ already flags the inconsistency, and until the profile is re-read with a date and a URL stamped against it we treat the 81% as a category-level reading rather than a fact about a named venue.

What it does measure cleanly: on the one public channel where a business chooses whether to reply, silence was the outcome about four times in five.

NFA arbitration is on the ladder, and we could not read a word of it

The National Futures Association runs an arbitration programme for disputes involving its Members. That is the whole of what we are prepared to state. Both of the NFA's arbitration pages returned HTTP 403 to us on 19 August 2026, so we publish no filing deadline, no fee schedule and no procedure from them. An earlier draft of this page carried a two-year limit, a tolling rule and a mediation-referral rule sourced to a page we could not open, and those have been removed. Read the NFA's own pages before acting, and note that requirement 3 above means running arbitration blocks a reparations claim on the same facts.

The structural constraint is the same one that governs reparations. Arbitration reaches NFA Members; a designated contract market holds a Section 5 designation as an exchange, which is a different status. We have not found either exchange entity described as an NFA Member in any source we have read, including Kalshi's own regulation explainer, which names DCM status and mentions no dispute route at all. Kalshi's /regulatory index returned HTTP 429 the same day.

State attorneys general are the widest rung and the least predictable

This rung has real subpoena power behind it and the least uniform behaviour. Every state runs a consumer protection function and most take complaints online. What varies is whether the office treats an event contract as a consumer product at all, and 2026 has made that question live rather than theoretical.

At least one office engages on the substance rather than the service level. The Massachusetts Attorney General's complaint concerning Kalshi describes the exchange as writing the rules for the contract and determining the basis for settlement, with no independent intermediary. That is a settlement-integrity argument, and it is the closest thing in our record to an outside body examining how these contracts resolve. We have not pulled that docket. The caption and number are unstamped in our notes and the source entry says so. Treat it as a pointer to a filing you should read, not a citation you can rely on. The mechanics of how these contracts resolve are at /guides/how-event-contracts-settle/.

Which rungs exist depends on which venue you are on

If you are on polymarket.com from a close-only jurisdiction, be honest about what that does to every rung above. You are not the customer these US forums were built to protect, and requirement 6 is waiting at the one rung that pays.

Do this in the first 48 hours, before you escalate anything

Every rung above asks for the same evidence, and it gets harder to obtain the longer you wait.

• Screenshot the market rules as displayed when you traded, including the resolution source line and any carveout. Rules text can be edited; your screenshot is the only version with your timestamp on it. What to look for is at /guides/how-to-read-a-markets-rulebook/.
• Export your fills: order IDs, prices, contract counts, UTC timestamps, and the fee charged on each leg.
• Check the fee arithmetic yourself, against the published schedules only. Polymarket's maker fee is zero and its taker rates are published by category; Kalshi's taker formula is published. For a Kalshi maker charge, do not check it against any rate, ours included: ask support in writing which published position applies, for the reasons set out above.
• Log every ticket: number, date opened, date of each reply, exact text. The 14-day BBB window and the two-year statutory clock both run on dates you will have to state.
• Record the balance and what is held, in dollars, with a screenshot. Documented cases in our corpus include an $89.27 hold on a winning bet and a $25 referral bonus never credited despite repeated support assurances. Small, specific and evidenced beats large and vague. If the hold is a verification hold, /guides/withdrawals-and-kyc/ covers what the complaint record shows about those, and /guides/where-your-money-sits/ covers custody.
• Do not close the account while any of this is open.

What we could not verify

• Whether a designated contract market can be named as a reparations respondent at all. Our reading of the statutory respondent test says no. We have found no CFTC statement addressing it directly and have not yet asked the Office of Proceedings.
• The list of respondent registration categories. The CFTC's complaint package is a PDF we could not extract text from. An earlier draft published a seven-category list attributed to it. That list is removed, not corrected, because we cannot re-read the file.
• Everything about NFA arbitration, both pages HTTP 403 on 19 August 2026, and whether either exchange entity is an NFA Member, which is not stated in any source we have read.
• The bond amount and waiver criteria for non-US reparations complainants. Requirement 6 exists; the size does not appear to be published anywhere we have found.
• Kalshi's maker fee position. Their newsroom and their help centre contradict each other and nobody has reconciled them publicly. Our scanner's 0.0175 coefficient is our own working assumption and is not evidence of what Kalshi charges.
• Kalshi's own dispute-resolution and limitation-of-liability provisions. The KalshiEX LLC rulebook is a CFTC-filed PDF we could not extract text from, and kalshi.com/regulatory returned HTTP 429.
• The read date and the platform behind the 174-of-214 figure, and a Trustpilot score of 1.9 out of 5 that appears in our notes for this niche with no profile named against it.
• The Massachusetts docket. Caption and number unstamped.
• Any case of a prediction-market customer winning a reparations award. We have not searched the decision archive. If one exists it changes this page materially.

Nobody pays us for this page, and our own log is down $28.30

PredictionEdge currently takes no referral revenue, and whether it ever will is undecided. There is no referral link on this page. A Polymarket referral code does exist on our scanner page at /scanner/ and it has earned nothing to date.

Our paper trade log is public: 10 trades, 6 closed, net minus $28.30 on $500 deployed, as of 4 August 2026. Our scanner finds momentum, not arbitrage: intra-market arbitrage is dead on modern Polymarket because Gamma prices sum to exactly $1.00, and we say so rather than let the word do work it has not earned.

A page whose revenue depends on you opening an account has a structural reason not to mention that the one rung which can order your money back may not reach the venue it is sending you to, and no reason at all to tell you that the venue's own maker-fee documentation contradicts itself. Apply that test to us too.

The questions people actually type

Support is not answering my ticket, what can I actually do? Five rungs sit above the ticket: the BBB, the CFTC tips door, CFTC reparations, your state attorney general, and NFA arbitration. Only reparations can order damages, and the statute limits it to persons registered under the Commodity Exchange Act, which is a different status from an exchange's Section 5 designation. Expect silence to be normal: in the BBB record we hold, 174 of 214 complaints closed with no response, which is 81%.

Can the CFTC get my money back from a prediction market? Not through the tips-and-complaints door, which feeds enforcement and makes you a source rather than a party. The reparations forum can award damages under Section 14 of the Commodity Exchange Act, 7 U.S.C. § 18, but its respondent test is registration under that Act, and the statutory text does not name a board of trade, contract market or exchange as a possible respondent. That is our reading, not a ruling.

How much does it cost to file a CFTC reparations complaint? Three options, all non-refundable. Voluntary is $50 for a claim of any amount, with no oral hearing and no appeal. Summary is $125 for claims of $30,000 or less. Formal is $250 for claims above $30,000, where normally an in-person hearing is held. An appeal carries a further $50. Fees are paid by check or money order, payable to the CFTC.

Does filing a BBB complaint do anything? It publishes. The business is asked to respond within 14 calendar days of filing, a follow-up letter goes out if it does not, and the complaint stays on the BBB profile for three years from the filing date. Nothing in the published process compels a business to act. In the record we hold, 81% of complaints closed unanswered.

How long do I have before it is too late to complain? Two years on the route that can award money. Section 14 of the Commodity Exchange Act allows a reparations complaint "at any time within two years after the cause of action accrues", and the CFTC's advisory adds within two years of when you should have known. We publish no NFA deadline because both NFA pages returned HTTP 403 to us on 19 August 2026.

Can I use NFA arbitration against Kalshi or Polymarket? Only if the respondent is an NFA Member, and we have not found either exchange entity described as one in any source we have read. We could not read either NFA arbitration page, both HTTP 403 on 19 August 2026, so we publish no deadline, fee or procedure from them. Note that CFTC eligibility requirement 3 bars running arbitration and reparations on the same claim at once.

Kalshi charged me a fee on a resting order. Can I complain that it does not match the schedule? Not cleanly, and this is the one rung-zero problem worth knowing. Kalshi's newsroom says resting orders are fee-exempt while its help centre says maker fees are charged, and nobody has reconciled the two publicly, so there is no single published figure to measure your charge against. Ask support in writing which position applies before you escalate. Our scanner's 0.0175 coefficient is our assumption, not Kalshi's rate.

I am not in the US. Do any of these routes work for me? Reparations requirement 6 says a non-citizen "may need to file a bond or waiver of bond" before a complaint is accepted, and that amount does not appear to be published. Against a $125 summary filing, an unpublished bond is a practical bar. Our own keyword mapping puts 84% of demand in this niche outside the US, and the geoblock list we read on 5 August 2026 has the United States and the United Kingdom close-only on polymarket.com.