Kalshi permanently bans George Santos over bets on his own attendance
Prediction market platform Kalshi has permanently banned former Republican U.S. House of Representatives member George Santos and fined him $71,356. The company said he traded contracts related to his own attendance at this year’s U.S. president’s address to Congress.
Bets on his own attendance
As CNBC Top News reports, ahead of President Donald Trump’s February speech, Santos allegedly earned more than $17,000 from bets on whether he would attend the event.
Kalshi said that for several weeks before the event, Santos made public statements about his potential attendance in an attempt to influence the prices of “yes” and “no” contracts. Some of these statements, according to the platform, were false or misleading. Kalshi considers these actions a violation of its rules on trading using non-public information.
A few days before Trump’s address, Santos wrote on X that he would attend the event from the guest gallery. On the day of the speech, he said that he was following it from an airport.
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Regulator’s decision
After detecting the trades, Kalshi passed the information to federal investigators. In July, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered Santos to pay $35,000 for trading contracts related to attendance at the president’s address and banned him from trading for three years. Santos’s lawyer then said that he had settled the case without admitting the regulator’s findings.
In a post on X, Santos responded to Kalshi’s decision and questioned the company’s future. In June, Kalshi competitor Polymarket ended its paid partnership with Santos, who worked there as an online influencer.
Other cases involving Santos
Santos represented New York’s 3rd congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from January 2023 until his expulsion from Congress that same year. He was sentenced to 87 months in prison for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, but President Trump commuted the sentence last year.
