Amid the carnage as the United States invaded Venezuela earlier this year, millions of dollars furiously changed hands on Polymarket — resulting in massive financial windfalls that immediately spurred allegations of insider trading.
One anonymous bettor in particular made out like a bandit, netting some $410,000 in winnings on extremely well-timed bets that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro would be “out” and that the US military would “show up in Venezuela” by January 31st.
It turns out that critics were right to be suspicious. According to the US Department of Justice, one of the special ops soldiers involved in the attack, named Gannon Ken Van Dyke, is alleged to have placed over $33,000 in Polymarket wagers related to Venezuela in the days leading up to the operation. Per a DoJ statement, Van Dyke was indicted on charges including unlawful use of confidential information for person gain, commodities and wire fraud, and theft of nonpublic government information.
The revelation isn’t entirely shocking, because there was already widespread suspicion that prediction markets like Polymarket attract exactly this type of ghoulish bets based on inside intel about upcoming bloodshed (in fact, Israel has already arrested several insiders for making similar bets.) But it’s a concrete example of exactly how deeply prediction markets rot crucial institutions, by giving people with explosive private information the ability to monetize it and remain anonymous.
More is likely to emerge about Van Dyke’s role in the January 3rd attack as the case progresses. According to a federal indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court, the spec ops grunt was an active-duty US Army soldier stationed in Fort Bragg, an infamous military installation known for corruption, graft, and drug violence.
After the proceeds were deposited to his account, Van Dyke is alleged to have moved the majority of his profits to an offshore cryptocurrency wallet before transferring them to a fresh brokerage account. According to the DoJ presser, he’s also alleged to have tried deleting his Polymarket account and changing the registered email address for his cryptocurrency exchange account in order to cover his tracks.
“Rather than safeguard that information as he was obligated to do, Van Dyke decided to use that classified information to place trades on a prediction market platform for his personal profit,” the indictment states. “Van Dyke subsequently tried to conceal his unlawful use of classified US Government information by attempting to obscure the source of his unlawful proceeds and to disguise his connection to the accounts linked to the illicit trades.”
Polymarket, for its part, appears to be using Van Dyke as a token figure to flatten criticism that it’s enabling this kind of insider trading at a massive scale. “Insider trading has no place on Polymarket,” a representative for the platform told media. “Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”
US President Donald Trump issued a stupefying statement that the “whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.” If that’s the case, then Trump obviously holds the house edge — not to mention a corner office at the Gaming Control Board — as his own family knows all too well.
More on Polymarket: Polymarket Has Turned Our Climate Apocalypse Into a Casino
The post The US Military Just Arrested One of Its Soldiers for Making Ghoulish Polymarket Bets, and It Shows How Deep the Moral Rot of Prediction Markets Really Goes appeared first on Futurism.
