US prosecutors have charged Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an active-duty soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with using classified information about the January raid that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro to place bets on Polymarket that netted more than 400,000 dollars. According to a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday, Van Dyke, who was involved in planning the raid, placed roughly 13 bets worth 33,034 dollars between December and end-January on positions including "US Forces in Venezuela" and "Maduro out". After profiting 409,881 dollars, he moved most of the winnings to a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then to a new online brokerage, and sought to hide his identity following reports of atypical trading on the Maduro contracts.
Acting US Attorney-General Todd Blanche said soldiers are "prohibited from using this highly sensitive information for personal financial gain", adding that "widespread access to prediction markets is a relatively new phenomenon, but federal laws protecting national security information fully apply". Van Dyke was charged with three counts of violating the Commodity Exchange Act, one count of wire fraud and one count of unlawful monetary transaction — each carrying a maximum sentence of 10 to 20 years. The case was assigned to the Manhattan federal court.
Polymarket said it had flagged the trades internally — "when we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ" — and framed the arrest as "proof the system works". The case is the highest-profile insider-trading prosecution linked to prediction markets, and lands as the broader industry faces fresh regulatory scrutiny: Vanguard's chief warned this week of "financial exploitation" by prediction markets, and French authorities are investigating potential tampering with weather-service data after suspicious Polymarket bets. Source: Financial Times, 24 April 2026, Stefania Palma.