TLDR
- Gabriel Perez, a former White House teleprompter operator, was fined $172,000 by the CFTC for insider trading on prediction platform Kalshi
- Perez read Trump’s speeches about an hour before delivery and bet on “presidential mention markets”
- He made over $107,500 in profits between December 2025 and February 2026
- Kalshi’s own surveillance unit flagged the suspicious trading activity
- The case is the CFTC’s second event contract insider trading settlement in four weeks
Prediction markets are under growing scrutiny after a former White House employee was caught using his access to President Trump’s speeches to profit from bets on what words the president would say.
Nearly $173,000 and a three-year trading ban.
That's the price a White House teleprompter operator is facing after federal regulators say he exploited advance access to President Trump's speeches to profit from bets on what Trump would say.
The CFTC says Gabriel Perez made more… pic.twitter.com/O6ddcptQOE
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 29, 2026
Gabriel Perez, a former teleprompter operator, agreed to pay $172,000 to settle charges brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He must repay $107,539 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty. He is also banned from trading on any CFTC-registered platform for three years.
Perez opened an account on Kalshi in December 2025. His job gave him access to Trump’s prepared remarks roughly an hour before they were delivered to the public.
He used that access to place bets on Kalshi’s “presidential mention markets.” These are contracts that pay out based on specific words or phrases a president uses in a speech. Because Perez already knew the content, he could bet with near certainty.
He traded between December 2025 and March 2026, accumulating more than $107,500 in winnings before regulators moved in.
Kalshi’s Surveillance Caught the Trades
It was Kalshi itself that flagged Perez. The exchange’s surveillance unit detected the suspicious activity and referred the case to the CFTC. Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, posted on X that the platform’s monitoring tools caught him.
“It doesn’t matter who you are: violate our rules or federal law and you will face the consequences,” DeNault wrote.
Perez cooperated fully with regulators. The CFTC said his cooperation was “exemplary,” which led to a roughly 40% reduction in his civil penalty. He consented to the settlement without admitting to the findings.
A Pattern of Prediction Market Abuse
This is not an isolated case. On July 31, former congressman George Santos agreed to pay around $35,000 to the CFTC over Kalshi trades tied to the State of the Union address. He was found to have misrepresented his own attendance on social media while holding positions in that market.
In May, federal prosecutors charged a Google engineer with using internal search data to make about $1.2 million on Polymarket. The CFTC filed a parallel civil complaint in that case.
A U.S. soldier was also charged earlier this year over Polymarket trades tied to a military operation in Venezuela. A video editor working for MrBeast was fired after an insider trading probe at Kalshi.
Both Kalshi and Polymarket tightened their controls in March 2026, adding new screening tools and updated conduct rules.
The CFTC is also working on a broader rules framework for prediction markets under Chair Michael Selig. Separately, a federal appeals court ruled against Kalshi in its dispute with Nevada gaming regulators, finding the company had not shown that federal law overrides the state’s gambling rules.
