CFTC Says Prediction Market Insider Trading Is An Enforcement Priority

The head of the CFTC's enforcement division has made clear that insider trading on prediction markets is a priority for the agency. 

Director of Enforcement David Miller put the message to industry at the PREDICT conference in New York in October, according to a National Law Review alert, rejecting the idea that the practice is victimless. 

The remarks fit a position he set out months earlier in a speech at NYU Law School.

Five Priorities

In remarks at NYU Law School on March 31, 2026, Miller listed five enforcement priorities for the division: insider trading, including in prediction markets; market manipulation, particularly in energy; market abuse and disruptive trading; retail fraud, including Ponzi schemes; and willful breaches of anti-money laundering and know-your-customer rules.

He called the belief that insider trading law does not reach prediction markets a myth. Insider trading, he said, violates the Commodity Exchange Act and the CFTC's anti-fraud rules, and the agency would work to detect, investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute it.

What Counts As Insider Trading

Miller drew a line around what the agency will pursue. Commodity and event-contract markets are built on price discovery rather than disclosure, so traders are free to act on their own knowledge. 

The CFTC's cases target people who trade or tip using misappropriated information in breach of a duty owed to its source, such as an employer or a government agency.

That distinction matters in practice. The National Law Review notes that trading on your own information is not insider trading under the misappropriation theory, which is why the agency charged former Congressman George Santos with manipulation rather than insider trading over contracts tied to his own attendance at the State of the Union. That case has since settled.

The Cases So Far

The National Law Review counts four prediction-market actions to date. 

Gannon Ken Van Dyke is accused of using information about the operation that removed Nicolás Maduro to make about $400,000 on contracts tied to Venezuela, and faces both criminal charges and a parallel civil action. 

A Google software engineer is alleged to have used advance access to the company's annual list of the most-searched terms to earn more than $1 million.

The third resolved case involved Gabriel Perez, a former White House teleprompter operator. In an order announced on August 28, the CFTC said he traded presidential mention-market contracts using speech information he had access to through his job. 

He must give up $107,539.02 in profits, pay a $65,000 civil penalty, which the agency said was discounted for his cooperation, and accept a three-year trading ban. The CFTC thanked KalshiEX for its assistance. 

Our earlier coverage of referrals piling up on mention markets shows how closely regulators have watched that contract type.

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Open Questions For The Industry

Defendants in these cases have raised threshold arguments, including that the trading took place outside the United States and that some contracts are not swaps and so fall outside the Commodity Exchange Act. 

How courts rule could shape how far the agency can extend its reach to offshore platforms. 

A federal prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, Nick Roos, appeared on the same PREDICT panel as Miller and signalled that prosecutors share the focus.

The alert advises employers to check that their trading and confidentiality policies clearly cover event contracts. 

For platforms and traders alike, the message from the regulator is that misusing confidential information for trading is treated as fraud, regardless of the market.