Prediction markets analysts told 60 Minutes Sunday that insider trading on U.S. military conflicts is exploding, and that the soldier accused of trading on the U.S. invasion of Venezuela was merely a small fish in a very large pond.
Last month, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke was indicted on federal charges for allegedly using information he had about the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to rake in $400,000 on Polymarket.
“In the U.S. it’s prohibited to make military bets on platforms like Polymarket, though it’s easy to find digital workarounds as Gannon Ken Van Dyke allegedly did,” 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim said. “Here is what’s more astounding than the existence of military bets — how often they pay off.”
“It’s alarming to see a culture around betting on war,” said reporter Michelle Kendler-Kretsch at the anti-corruption data collective that examined Polymarket bets on military actions.
“She looked specifically at long-shot wagers, bets with less than 35% odds,” Wertheim said. “Despite being underdogs, they won more than they lost, a telltale sign, she says, of, quote, ‘systemic insider trading.”
Kendler-Kretsch said that military bets on those long-shot wagers have a 52% success rate, while sports bets are at just 7%.
“This might be the most insane pattern we have found on Polymarket so far,” said Nicolas Vaiman, who runs a small data analystics firm called Bubblemaps based in Paris, France. The firm, “creates visualizations of bets on Polymarket to spot bubbles, or clusters, of suspect traders,” Wertheim said.
“This big cluster in the middle, no one talked about it,” said the firm’s head of investigations, who goes by the online handle Deebs.
“They shared, for the first time, what they believe is a more egregious insider trading case than Gannon Ken Van Dyke’s,” Wertheim said.
“We spotted nine Polymarket accounts all connected who made collectively $2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. Military operations. Van Dyke made $400,000. Here $2.4 million. Now, here is the crazy part. 98% win rates,” Vaiman said.
“This is like winning the lottery multiple times,” Deebs added.
“The linked accounts made dozens of winning bets on the specific dates of pivotal moments in the war with Iran even when the odds were low,” Wertheim said before asking, “How do we know this isn’t just someone who has really good instincts?”
“Luck alone cannot explain the numbers,” Vaiman said.
“If you know this, why don’t federal prosecutors?” Wernheim asked.
“Well, hopefully with your interview, they’re going to know this,” Vaiman answered.
Watch the clip above via 60 Minutes on CBS.
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