Who can stop insider trading on prediction markets?
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2026
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A series of suspiciously well-timed Iran war bets placed on Polymarket have revived concerns about insider trading on prediction markets. But enforcement is something of a gray area. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino joins Kimberly to explain the relatively recent history of insider trading laws at the CFTC and what it could mean for prediction market platforms. Plus, the debate over whether insider trading on these markets is actually a good thing.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.1 | So as the U.S. military has engaged in different military operations this year, first in Venezuela, then in Iran, some people have made a lot, and I mean a lot of money in |
| 0:24.6 | prediction markets. And some of these enormous, suspiciously well-timed-timed bets have a lot of people |
| 0:31.6 | thinking that insider information was at play. Marketplace's Megan McCarty-Carino has been |
| 0:36.9 | reporting on this, and she's here to |
| 0:38.3 | make us smart about it. Megan, welcome back. Hey, so good to be here. So folks listening may have |
| 0:44.4 | seen some of the headlines over the past few months about these big bets and how oddly timed |
| 0:50.7 | they were. But for those who haven't, can you give us an idea of the scale of some of these |
| 0:55.8 | bets that have made people suspect insider information was a play? Right. So I think one of the |
| 1:01.8 | first ones that really started raising suspicion was a bet on whether Nicholas Maduro, the former |
| 1:10.2 | president of Venezuela, would be out of office. |
| 1:13.6 | And right before, you know, this military action that captured him, a new account bet on |
| 1:20.5 | Polly Market that he would be out of office. They won more than $400,000. |
| 1:26.0 | There have been a number of kind of suspiciously timed big winning bets by, |
| 1:32.6 | you know, accounts that are only betting on geopolitical events having to do with specific actions |
| 1:39.8 | with the war with Iran. Most recently, there was a flurry of activity around the ceasefire that was |
| 1:47.5 | announced. Bloomberg reported that $1.7 million had been flowing through these platforms, you know, |
| 1:55.5 | around the ceasefire. And there actually have been some arrests in Israel, actually, of two people accused of using classified military information to bet on polymarket. |
| 2:07.4 | I think that was going back to the conflict last summer with Iran. |
| 2:12.0 | So this is not only speculation. |
| 2:14.5 | There have actually been, you know, arrests made, not in the U.S., but, you know, in |
| 2:19.9 | Israel. So here in the U.S., a key distinction in all of this and whether it like counts as |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marketplace, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Marketplace and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.