Kalshi refers George Santos to DOJ and CFTC over State of the Union bets
Kalshi referred former U.S. Representative George Santos to the Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission after detecting suspicious trading on its platform. Santos had publicly boasted he would attend President Donald Trump's State of the Union address, then allegedly placed bets against his own attendance using non-public knowledge of his schedule. The referral triggered a federal investigation into potential insider trading or market manipulation by a public official. Santos, who was expelled from Congress and imprisoned last year on unrelated federal fraud charges, subsequently threatened an NPR reporter covering the probe and lied about making the threat.
Every CFTC-registered exchange must now demonstrate surveillance capable of catching insiders who trade on their own non-public schedules. Any platform that fails to self-report such abuse risks co-defendant exposure when DOJ and CFTC file parallel actions.
Santos to the running roster of government, military, and corporate insiders facing federal charges for prediction-market trading, after the DOJ-CFTC filed their first coordinated insider-trading case just hours earlier.