Prediction Markets Getting Flooded with Accounts Making Money Off Iran War Raise Concerns About Corrupt Betting by Trump Insiders

Alongside cryptocurrency, the Trump administration has championed online “prediction markets,” a kind of legalized gambling that gives scope for corrupt insiders to make money by “predicting” events that they already know are going to happen. Combine those two, and you get Trump insiders using crypto to scam the prediction markets.

The Guardian describes the pattern:

Eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March, bet a total of nearly $70,000 on there being a ceasefire. They stand to make nearly $820,000 if such a deal is reached before 31 March.

An account that made the same bet was created shortly before the US struck Iran on 28 February. It also placed a winning bet on those strikes, which raised similar questions around insider trading, and so far has bet on nothing else.

The new accounts all appear to have been created late last week, around the time when the U.S. president, Donald Trump, appeared to first double down on war with Iran, then suggest in an after-markets Truth Social post that he was considering “winding down” military operations.

The wallets “definitely [look like] someone with some degree of inside info”, said Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, now building an AI trading platform called Starchild.

Polymarket accounts are anonymous, and it is extremely difficult to trace the owners of the crypto wallets that laid the bets.

There is a segment of the tech industry that is devoted to finding technologically novel ways to commit white-collar crime. They are matched, at this moment, by an administration that is determined not to investigate, prosecute, or regulate such crimes—perhaps because its own insiders are busy committing them.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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