The Next President Should Investigate Insider Trading on Prediction Markets
A teleprompter guy and a Green Beret got busted because they bet under their own names. But no one is looking into the anonymous wallets that made real money.
Gabriel Perez was Donald Trump’s teleprompter guy. According to recent reports, he bet on what words the president would say during speeches. Investigators think Perez used his advance knowledge to wager on Kalshi’s “mention” markets, the contracts that pay out if the president says a specific word or phrase. When Trump skipped a word or a line, Perez would even back out of the bet during the speech.
Kalshi’s systems picked up on the pattern, froze more than $90K in his account and referred him to the CFTC. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan declined to bring a criminal case and Perez is reportedly negotiating a settlement where he’ll likely have to give the money back.
Back in April, the CFTC charged Gannon Van Dyke, an Army Special Forces soldier, who helped plan the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January. He bought more than 436K “yes” shares of Polymarket’s “Maduro Out by January 31, 2026?” contract in the days ahead of the raid. He made over $404K and faces a federal indictment too.
Both of these cases include relatively normal people (with extraordinary access). The winnings were relatively small, especially to other lucrative trades on these markets. They bet under identities that the trading platforms could see and then the platforms turned them in.
So who hasn’t been caught? Three anonymous Polymarket accounts made more than $600K buying US-Iran ceasefire contracts back in late March and early April, when the odds of a truce were below 35%. There was one account that kept buying, right up until hours before Trump announced the ceasefire on social media. White House lawyers reviewed the trades, according to the WSJ, and determined that it’d be nearly impossible to figure out whether Trump officials were behind them because Polymarket allows anonymous accounts.
But the people who knew the ceasefire was coming were a tight, small and identifiable group. It doesn’t surprise me that this administration has shown no appetite for looking deeper into the question.
Donald Trump Jr. became a paid strategic adviser to Kalshi in January 2025, reportedly receiving about $300K in equity. 7 months later he also joined the advisory board of Polymarket, Kalshi’s chief and essentially only rival, as his investment firm put tens of millions into the company. This came weeks after the DOJ and CFTC dropped their Polymarket investigations, and 8 days before the CFTC gave Polymarket a green light to return to the US market.
Imagine if Hunter Biden did that.
Everyone in DC knows this is happening. Earlier this year, the White House sent a staff memo warning that betting on nonpublic information is a criminal offense. In April, the Senate unanimously banned its own members and staff from prediction market trading. But the laws currently on the books can only reach an insider who bets under his or her own name, which is how Van Dyke ended up indicted. A cabinet official, top advisor, envoy, family member or a donor can trade through cut outs, park the money in crypto or overseas and leave investigators with few obvious leads.
In 1933, the Senate handed Ferdinand Pecora subpoena power and he put Jack Morgan and Charles Mitchell (Depression-era Wall Street barons) under oath. He exposed the shady practices, fraud and the tax dodges and put it all into the public record. The result was the Securities Act, the Exchange Act and ultimately the SEC.
The next administration should create a Pecora-style commission on prediction markets with actual teeth: subpoena power and blockchain forensics to unwind the anonymous wallets behind these trades. There’s gotta be criminal referrals wherever crimes were committed, no matter whose name comes up.
There’s no public evidence connecting any specific Trump official to the ceasefire trades. But at the baseline, the scandal is that nobody with subpoena power has looked into it and wanted a real accounting of who controlled these wallets, who funded them and where the money went.
France just ordered its internet providers to block Polymarket and Brazil blocked prediction market platforms in April, but they’re growing like wildfire in the US. Any Democrat running for president in 2028 should promise a commission on this now, on the record.