1 hour ago
3
Hours before US and Israeli forces killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a bet that would result in a $553,000 pay off was placed on the prediction market website Polymarket.
The contract, as Polymarket calls its wagers, predicted the Supreme Leader would be out of power.
The trader, known only as “Magamyman” was not alone. Others contracted $500 million on the bombing of Iran. It’s led to allegations of insider trading, with fingers pointed at leaks from the military being exploited by savvy gamblers.
On the morning of January 3, the secret raid on Caracas, Venezuela, by US Army Delta Forces to capture alleged narco-terrorist president Nicolás Maduro and bring him to the US to face justice provided another windfall for those in the know.
Ahead of the capture of Maduro — a top-secret military operation — an anonymous trader bet $32,000 on the Venezuelan strongman being seized and took in excess of $400,000.
Also on Polymarket, a full-time trader by the name of Evan Semet made bank as well. However, he is not some Washington insider or tapped in military mole. He is a former options trader who knows how to spot movements that connote knowledge.
Semet told The Post he “noticed that two new wallets [accounts to make wagers] bought an enormous amount of shares [that Maduro would be ousted]. Then we started bombing Venezuela and the insider-meter was going off like crazy.”
Between the ousting of Maduro and the release of his mugshot, informed by following the smart money, Semet made $12,500 in a flash.
Polymarket did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
It’s not just global conflicts that have raised eyebrows on the prediction markets. It’s been alleged insiders have taken advantage of pop-culture events with outcomes which are decided ahead of time.
For example, on March 17, bettors on Kalshi gave Mike White a 98 percent chance of being eliminated from the pre-taped episode of “Survivor.” He was one of 20 still in the game.
While there is no evidence of tampering, it is easy to wonder if they had a tip off.
Even the Academy Awards raised suspicions that word of the winners could have leaked out. Though there is no clear indication it did, all events where the outcomes are pre-determined — like the winners of awards where votes are counted ahead of time, rather than the results of a sports match — are ripe for picking off. There’s a reason why Las Vegas casinos do not take bets on the Oscars.
“Any kind of market like this, where some people know the answer or have a very good idea of what the answer would be, [people] can monetize it,” sports bettor and blogger Isaac Rose Berman told The Post after the Academy Awards wrapped. “There’s not really any rules in place about what you can and can’t do.”
Semet exploited that reality during this year’s Super Bowl, and it had nothing to do with the Seahawks or Patriots. “My bets were all on the half-time show,” he said. “I had bets that Lady Gaga would perform, plus the first Bad Bunny song; I can’t pronounce it, and I never heard a Bad Bunny song in my life.”
Yet Semet still won close to $50,000 on those positions. “There was a lot of volume [other bets] and I figured that there definitely would be insider trading,” he said. “Thousands of people had to know all this.”
While Lady Gaga wasn’t announced as a performer at the Super Bowl, it is possible, for example, that people could have heard her soundcheck before the performance or tracked her private jet landing in Santa Clara, California, ahead of it.
Mick Mulvaney, a Republican politician who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2017 until 2020 believes prediction sites can have dangerous implications for America’s national security.
He pointed out that once someone puts a wager on an impending global incident such as the ousting of a world leader, America’s enemies could act upon it.
“Foreign intelligence services are combing the prediction markets looking for insider trading as predictions on government activity,” Mulvaney said. “If I were a foreign intelligence officer, I would absolutely do that.”
In response to that, Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana told The Post, “Large bets don’t necessarily mean there’s insider trading. We monitor it all.”
Representative Greg Casar, (D-Texas), is more skeptical, “They’re either very lucky or they have very secret information for cashing in on things.”
Casar and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy have introduced a bill called Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions, also known by the grabbier BETS OFF, that would put the kibosh on prediction markets wagering on sensitive military operations.
And while you can still bet on most anything, Kalshi has made clear at least one outcome is verboten: Customers cannot bet on death.
The platform underscored this by pulling back $54 million in bets made on the ouster of Khameni when the Iranian boss was killed in a missile strike. A class action lawsuit has been filed, although Kalshi claims it made clear in its rules that “people cannot trade on the outcome of death.”
Violent kidnapping, however, appears to be accepted, as regime change bets related to Maduro did pay off. “Maduro was okay,” Diana said. “The wording was that he would be out.” Acknowledging that he was taken by force, she said the wager “was okay … It’s in our rules. There was no death involved.” (Venezuela’s interior ministry disputes this, claiming 100 soldiers were killed in the raid, per Reuters)
Additionally, Kalshi, which is a federally regulated exchange, overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, makes an effort to keep insiders from trading on the platform.
This point was driven home when a now-former video editor for MrBeast was revealed to have a knack for profiting on “mention bets.” These are wagers in which someone pushes out money on a certain word being used in a public setting – including political speeches, podcasts and TV shows.
The video editor had seen MrBeast’s shows ahead of time and knew what was to be said. Kalshi recognized “he was too successful” and suspended him from the site for five years, then MrBeast fired him.
Diana said that Kalshi is “looking at” over 200 cases of possible infractions. “If people don’t believe in our markets, they just won’t use Kalshi and that is not what we want,” she said. “There is an incentive to keep this thing safe.”
Beyond concerns about people finding edges for making money, Mulvaney expresses concerns at the very foundation of prediction markets.
They are legal because they offer people the chance to buy into outcomes, like in a stock market, rather than wagering a bet against a house which sets odds, therefore avoiding being gambling, in its truest sense.
However, it also ensures that for every winner there is no shortage of losers, as those who triumph take much of their money wagered on the opposite outcome by other users.
“Prediction markets are out of whack in that they offer the exact same sports bets with the exact same odds as those on [sports betting site] DraftKings,” said Mulvaney.
“I can’t bet on North Carolina State in South Carolina, because sports gambling is not allowed there. But I can buy a contract on North Carolina [via Kalshi or Polymarket]. That really bugs me.”
Nevertheless, trading on prediction markets exceeded $44 billion in 2025 and there seems to be little appetite for regulating them from the administration. So, although there may still be some arguing over the fine print and exact rules, we’ll take odds on prediction markets being around to stay.
English (US)