Polymarket bettor made $400,000 with wagers on removal of Maduro

A mysterious online bettor has won more than $400,000 on Polymarket, a website that lets people bet on cryptocurrency on the odds of real-world events happening, correctly predicting that the United States would invade Venezuela and overthrow President Nicolas Maduro.

The bets, which are viewable on Polymarket’s website, have sparked new concerns that the rise of Polymarket and other similar platforms may make it easy for insiders privy to confidential or even classified information to use their knowledge to profit from it.

In the early hours of Saturday, the US military carried out a special operation to capture Maduro and his wife and bring them to the United States to face narcoterrorism charges.

Polymarket does not facilitate contact between users. The account in question only made 13 bets, totaling $33,934.34. All were placed between December 27 and January 3 and were linked to the likelihood that the United States would soon invade Venezuela and Maduro would be removed from office. It is unclear when and where the account was created. Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.

President Trump had claimed earlier in December that Maduro’s days were “numbered” but had generally refrained from publicly giving details of an operation to remove Maduro. U.S. officials told NBC News that Trump decided before Christmas to authorize the operation in Venezuela, but left it for the day. The timing was not widely known at the Pentagon until late Friday evening, the officials said. That night, before the news was made public, the Polymarket user placed his largest and final bet, betting over $14,000.

The identity of the bettor, his location and whether he was directly or indirectly informed of an ongoing classified US military operation – or whether he simply had extraordinary and improbable luck – is unknown.

But it doesn’t appear they were trying to hide their tracks, said a spokesperson for Chainalysis, a company that tracks and analyzes cryptocurrency transactions, most of which are public. The person already cashed out their Polymarket winnings in Solana, a type of cryptocurrency, through a major U.S. exchange, without any indication that they attempted to hide or launder the funds, the Chainalysis spokesperson said. If regulators or law enforcement went looking for the punter, they would likely have no trouble locating him.

At least four other Polymarket accounts seen by NBC News made bets solely on Maduro leaving at the end of January, although theirs were comparatively smaller. All of these bets were placed between Thursday and Saturday between $700 and $900 and returned between $7,000 and $14,000. It could not be determined whether these people had inside information or simply guessed correctly.

The rapid proliferation of prediction markets has created a betting market for just about anything, whether mundane, consequential or miraculous.

There’s money to be made predicting whether entrepreneur and reality TV star Kim Kardashian will pass the bar exam, whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated this year, or whether the second coming of Jesus Christ will occur in the next 12 months.

But the sheer scale of prediction markets and the way companies evaluate results in open source leave the door open to possible manipulation.

Let’s take an example regarding the war between Russia and Ukraine. Polymarket users can bet on which country’s military will control certain cities, all presented on a map maintained by an independent think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Bettors who predicted Russia would take the town of Myrnohrad by November 15 were paid off when the market resolved to “yes”, citing the think tank’s map. But days later, the institute said in a statement that “an unauthorized and unapproved modification to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 (Eastern Time).” » Last month, 404 Media reported that the montage briefly showed Russia capturing Myrnohrad before his disappearance.

Betting platforms also have dozens of political markets, where users can bet on the winners and losers of individual races across the country, whether primary or general elections.

There have been controversial cases of DC insiders betting on politics, including Sean McElwee, formerly of the progressive data firm Data for Progress. McElwee left the company in 2022, following that year’s midterm elections and the indictment of a key ally, billionaire and political megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried, for fraud related to the FTX cryptocurrency exchange he ran. An excerpt from the 2023 Washington Post book detailed how McElwee bet thousands of dollars on races his company worked on, including telling the book’s author that he ordered polls “primarily” to get more information to inform his bets.

Prediction markets currently operate in a legally murky area, having faced restrictions and scrutiny that have partly eased under the Trump administration. Polymarket had previously banned Americans from the platform, based on rules from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a federal agency that regulates US derivatives markets.

This summer, the CFTC told Polymarket that it would launch an investigation into the company, and on November 25, Polymarket said the CFTC had approved its operation as a U.S. exchange. New users are still asked to check a box indicating that they are not American or do not reside in the United States to create an account, but Polymarket has started rolling out options for Americans to bet.

Congressman Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., plans to introduce a bill on the topic later this week. Called the Public Integrity in Financial Forecasting Markets Act of 2026, the bill seeks to explicitly criminalize capitalizing on nonpublic information on such sites, a spokesperson for his office said.

David Chase, a former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney who now works as a securities defense attorney, told NBC News that using inside information to gain financial advantage in commodities trading is generally considered fraud, but that legal precedent has been slow to address the legality of betting on such information.

“I think the courts are going to have to catch up, as they generally do,” Chase said.