US Special Forces Soldier Charged with Insider Trading on Prediction Market

A US special forces member involved in the January operation to capture Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the mission to win more than $400,000 (€341,000) in an online betting market, officials said.

Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a senior enlisted soldier, was part of the operation to capture Maduro in January and used his access to classified information to make money on the prediction market site Polymarket, the federal prosecutor’s office in New York said.

He has been charged by the Justice Department with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of non-public government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud and making an unlawful monetary transaction.

If he is convicted on all counts, he faces a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison.

Van Dyke, 38, was involved in the planning and execution of capturing Maduro for about a month beginning on 28 December, according to the federal prosecutor’s office.

Even though he signed nondisclosure agreements promising not to divulge "any classified or sensitive information" related to the operation, prosecutors say the soldier used this information to place a series of bets that Maduro would be out of power by 31 January.

"This involved a US soldier who allegedly took advantage of his position to profit off of a righteous military operation," FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post to social media.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, announced on Thursday that it had filed a parallel complaint against Van Dyke.

That complaint alleges that Van Dyke moved $35,000 (€29,000) from his personal bank account into a cryptocurrency exchange account on 26 December, a little over a week before US forces would fly into Caracas and seize Maduro.

Van Dyke used more than $32,500 (€27,777) to make a series of bets on when Maduro might be removed from power, according to the complaint.

He placed those bets between 30 December and 2 January, with the vast majority occurring on the night of 2 January, just hours before the surprise military action in Caracas.

The bets Van Dyke made on Maduro leaving power resulted in "more than $404,000 of profits," the complaint said. Bets on three other Venezuela-related contracts netted Van Dyke more than $5,000 (€4,273), according to the document.

"The defendant was entrusted with confidential information about US operations and yet took action that endangered US national security and put the lives of American service members in harm's way," said Michael Selig, the commission's chairman.

The massive profits from the well-timed bets aroused public attention days after the raid and sparked bipartisan calls for stricter regulation of the markets where people can wager on just about anything.