Ah, new and different ways to cheat! Is this a great country, or what?
Kalshi is an online prediction gambling operation where users can bet on everything from how long the government shutdown will last to Oscar winners to what show will top Netflix’s streaming numbers in a given week. Naturally political bets are particularly popular.
And, also naturally, some users will try to cheat by betting on matters they have some control over or insider information about. Last week Kalshi slapped down and fined three political candidates who tried to bet on their own races: Mark Moran, an independent running for U.S. Senate in Virginia, Ezekiel Enriquez, a former Republican congressional candidate in Texas, and Matt Klein, a Democratic Minnesota state senator who is running for Congress.
Kalshi’s head of enforcement and legal counsel said that the sanctions are part of Kalshi’s “proactive engineering solutions” to “identify illicit trading activity.” Kalshi’s rules were recently updated to ban politicians from betting on their own candidacies. I see no difference between a candidate doing this and a baseball player (like the late Pete Rose) betting for or against his own teams. The New York Times fatuously writes, “It’s unclear if they were trading in a manner that was relying on inside information.” What? By definition the bets were based on inside information: every candidate is an insider regarding his or her own race! What if the candidate knows a personal scandal is ready to break? What if he or she knows money is running out, or the campaign’s polls look dire?
Ethics Alarms 
The DOJ just charged a member of the military with predicting the take down of Maduro and he was part of the operation.
Wow. Couldn’t he be court martialed and end up in Leavenworth?
Details
A U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has been charged with using classified information to bet on the mission on Polymarket, a prediction marketplace, federal authorities said on Thursday.
The soldier, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, made more than $400,000 by betting on different outcomes related to Venezuela after learning of the operation, federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. said.
An indictment filed in Manhattan federal court says Sergeant Van Dyke, 38, was involved in the “planning and execution” of the seizure of Mr. Maduro and was making bets up to Jan. 2, the day before the seizure of the Venezuelan leader and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a Caracas compound.
I’d put it in quotes from the NYTimes but they don’t have a problem with taking things from evil corporations.
Thirty- and forty-year-olds and cell phone betting. A match made in hell. Brilliant.
This could be a serious national security risk. Monitoring the trends of bets being made on government actions (like Chris notes on the Maduro raid) could tip off the subjects of impending federal or military actions. The info could be sold to bad actors, or the operators (or employees) of the services could even arrange to be on the payrolls of foreign regimes, contracting to warn them of impending moves against them.
Even someone on the outside observing the changing odds on such bets could be alerted by the trends. AI cruising the info would make it even easier. Any wagering on political or military actions should be prohibited.