With betting apps—sorry, “prediction markets”—like Kalshi and Polymarket, it’s easier than ever to profit off of deadly conflicts.
An anonymous user made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with dozens of eerily accurate bets about the ongoing Iran war, CNN reported on Tuesday.
The user bet with a 93 percent accuracy on topics such as when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes would occur in 2024, 2025, and 2026.
This is not the first time that people who appear to have inside information have used sites like Polymarket to profit off of violent acts.
A few days before the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a raid, a user created a Polymarket account and wagered tens of thousands of dollars that Maduro would be in U.S. custody by the end of the month. They won more than $400,000.
Gambling, once tightly regulated in the U.S., has become easier to access than ever with the rise of betting apps. It has rapidly invaded sports, politics, and culture—even CNN, which broke the Polymarket story, has a deal with rival group Kalshi to use its data in their news coverage.
Both Kalshi and Polymarket ostensibly ban insider trading, but with anonymous accounts and plausible deniability, the apps make it easy for those in the know to profit.
Sometimes the sites will even let slip that they’re fine with the practice. In November, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan told Axios it was “super cool” that his app “creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market.”
While some lawmakers and government watchdogs are looking to regulate the addictive, often unethical apps, Kalshi and Polymarket have an advocate in the president, a former casino owner. The Trump administration closed active investigations into the sites at the start of Trump’s second term, and Donald Trump Jr. has been hired as a board member of Polymarket and a “strategic adviser” of Kalshi. The war profiteering will continue until further notice.