Soldier's lawyers return to court in $400,000 Polymarket insider trading case
Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke's lawyers returned to a Manhattan courtroom Monday. Van Dyke pleaded not guilty in April after prosecutors alleged he made more than $400,000 on Polymarket by trading on classified information about Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro's capture. The case involves alleged insider trading on the crypto-native prediction market platform. The soldier is accused of using his military position to gain nonpublic knowledge of the operation and profit from contracts tied to the outcome. Monday's court appearance continues the pretrial proceedings in what prosecutors are framing as an abuse of classified intelligence for personal financial gain on an unregulated prediction market.
Van Dyke's prosecution extends the DOJ's new misappropriation theory from tech employees to military personnel, forcing Polymarket to surveil for classified-information exploits across both government and corporate leakers. Any conviction widens the platform's co-defendant exposure in future DOJ-CFTC parallel actions.
Becomes the second federal insider-trading prosecution tied to Polymarket in under two days, after the DOJ's Spagnuolo case last week, as government lawyers test the misappropriation theory across both military classified information and tech company search data.