US DoJ Investigates George Santos Over Kalshi Trades Tied to Trump Speech

• The U.S. Department of Justice and the CFTC are investigating former Rep. George Santos over trades placed on the prediction market Kalshi tied to his attendance at President Trump’s February 24 State of the Union address, NPR reported on June 2.
• Santos allegedly bet that he would not attend while publicly saying he would, then skipped the speech, allegedly profiting in the tens of thousands of dollars after the market’s odds collapsed.
• Kalshi detected the activity, froze his account, and referred the matter to federal authorities, adding to a widening crackdown on insider trading across prediction markets.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are investigating former Rep. George Santos over trades he allegedly placed on the prediction market Kalshi, according to three people with direct knowledge of his trades who were not authorized to speak publicly, NPR reported on June 2. The trades concerned whether Santos would attend President Donald Trump’s February 24 State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.

The probe lands as prediction markets face mounting scrutiny over who profits from non-public information. Traders had wagered millions of dollars on which public figures would appear at the speech, and Santos became one of the most watched names in that market after he signaled, then reversed, his plans.

Reached by NPR, Santos brushed off the inquiry. “Well, that’s news to me,” Santos said when asked about the insider trading probe underway into his activity on Kalshi.

According to the reporting, Santos had already placed bets on Kalshi that he was not going to appear at the State of the Union address, even as he publicly indicated he would attend. The day before the speech, he posted a video on social media suggesting he planned to be in the gallery. He never showed. “Watching SOTU from an airport tv was not part of the plan! FML,” Santos wrote on X as Trump spoke, sending the odds tied to his attendance tumbling. Three sources told NPR that Santos misled the public and turned a profit based on that deception in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Kalshi flagged the trades, froze the account, and escalated the case. The exchange detected Santos’ trades, froze his account, and referred the case to the CFTC and the DoJ, which both opened investigations into Santos. Kalshi has also requested to interview Santos as part of its investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Neither the CFTC nor the DoJ returned requests for comment. Kalshi declined to comment.

Santos, who served in Congress for less than a year before his 2023 expulsion, was serving a seven-year sentence for aggravated identity theft and wire fraud charges related to his 2022 midterm campaign when Trump commuted his sentence. He spent under three months in prison before his release.

The case fits a broader enforcement pattern. In April, federal prosecutors charged a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier with making roughly $409,881 in Polymarket bets tied to the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and a separate case involved a Google employee accused of generating more than $1 million in gains from Polymarket trades linked to search trends. Congressional pressure has grown alongside the prosecutions. On May 22, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., announced investigations into insider trading on Kalshi and Polymarket, requesting documents on each platform’s monitoring and identity-verification systems.

For now, Santos remains a fixture of the markets that flagged him. Even with his account frozen, traders bet nearly $90,000 on what words Santos would utter during an interview on Newsmax last month, a sign of how durable his draw has become for a sector still trying to convince regulators it can police itself.

Editorial Note: This news article has been written with assistance from AI. Edited & fact-checked by the Editorial Team.

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