I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.
The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.
And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.
Of course he should be punished but the best lesson here is for bettors. Those who wager on "prediction markets": you are betting against people who have access to more information or can influence the outcome of the wager. Don't waste your money.
That's sort of the point of prediction markets: they surface insider information by allowing people to profit off of it. The benefit is to people watching the prices, who can then use that information to make better decisions ahead of the answer being revealed to the public. It's not necessarily to market participants, who need to be aware of who else is trading the market and have a credible reason to believe they have better information.
The unfortunate thing is that, while their academic position sounds plausible on paper, just like with most crypto things it's just a money grab.
How many crypto people (with legitimate backgrounds just like the founders of Polymarket and Kalshi) stood up and said big things about freedom and the unbanked etc., turns out they were literally just scamming people- there are so many examples besides FTX.
Letting people bet on any random thing is not at all related to this "price everything" theory. If that was their real goal they wouldn't behave so much like a normal sports betting company. I have yet to actually hear anyone defend their actual actions in a plausible way.
It barely makes sense, though? The idea is that it will surface insider information to the public. That happens only because the insider is financially incentivized to place a bet. But they will only bet if they can win money, and they can only win money if someone is taking the other side of their bet, which necessarily means someone without their insider information.
In other words, prediction markets require suckers to lose money to insiders in order for the public to learn new information. In this case, people lost over a million dollars to an insider so the public could learn that "d4vd" was searched a lot.
People with insider information often aren't necessarily aware they even have it. "Superforecasters" are often just "good at predicting" moves within a given vertical, because they have expertise and exposure to the trends of that vertical, and are good at making deductions and extrapolating trends. Those people make money from prediction markets just as often as people with true insider info do.
And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
Which is to say: prediction markets can still work and be worthwhile to participate in, even if everyone in them is rational. They don't require suckers.
But, in practice, they certainly do seem to attract them.
That’s the academic theory behind these markets, but there’s no actual value to knowing who the most searched celebrity will be or any of this other garbage. It’s just an unregulated casino with guesses about the popularity of Google searches instead of guessing black or red.
It’s not rare nowadays that speculation on some topic will include the Polymarket rates. Google searches: Maybe not. Maybe that’s just gambling for the fun of it.
I think they are open about it. John Oliver did a piece on it last month and I recall an interview where the founder of one of these prediction markets shared this as a beneficial effect of the product.
Sure, but let’s consider the bet the accused took: who is the most searched person in 2025. What benefit is there in knowing this ahead of time? Who is making decisions based on this?
Couldn’t that same argument be used to justify stock market insider trading? The problem with insiders is not just that they can surface information, but they can actually manipulate the results. It’s why baseball players can’t bet on the results of their games, even if a prediction market guru might argue “their bets surface valuable information” or something.
Hmm, not following. The insider trade in this case was small enough to not change the lines meaningfully, no? D4vd's chances of being #1 went from <1% to >99% nearly overnight, was a huge upset.
Polymarket might be different, but conventional Vegas-style lines change with the amount of $$ bet, if the pool is $50M and an insider bets $10k on the long shot, the line isn't moving -- I don't see how insider information can be surfaced in this scenario except after the fact (and only maybe then).
In other words, if the line changes enough to signal insider info, it's not really insider info anymore.
Because these markets aren't all that efficient yet (possibly because other potential market participants are scared off by insider trading charges). You don't have multiple people that all have insider information betting against each other, you have one person with insider information that cleans out everybody else. If this repeats enough, all the people without insider information will get cleaned out and exit the market, all the other people with insider information will enter the market for profit, and prices should converge to true likelihood.
And yes, the whole purpose of prediction markets is to turn insider info into public info.
But you just said "The benefit is to people watching the prices" -- but if the odds haven't properly converged what information does watching the prices get you before-the-fact?
Maybe I'm just not getting it, could you lay out a scenario?
The point is to make money by letting people gamble on the future. What you said is a second order effect of doing the first thing. They should at least be regulated under gambling laws, doesnt make sense without it
What Polymarket says on the topic (https://integrity.polymarket.com/) is that they do not surface insider information and you mustn't trade if you have any.
Because the prediction market community is filled with liars and fraudsters, of course, it does seem to be common knowledge that this restriction isn't meant to be taken seriously, much like Polymarket's fake rule that Americans aren't allowed to use it.
But once you start from the premise that everything prediction markets say about their rules and practices is a lie, why should we believe they provide any genuine signal for anything?
Also, at least on Polymarket, beware of those who can influence the settlement of the wager, which may settle not in concordance with the actual outcome in reality.
Why are we wasting government money cracking down on Polymarket betting? The most offensive thing in this article is the government pretending Polymarket bets are securities. Prediction markets provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.
So now the real bet he lost is salary + time for all those years he is going to prision + lower job for decades after prison. This person bet Millions to get $1M basically and lost both, very rare gambling level lost from smart(used to) person. At least normal gambler loses what they have and some debt.
He was Staff-level as well. That's minimum $500k a year or more. And tenure often grows pay disproportionately at Google. That's easily $20 million lost.
Anderson Cooper: But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.
Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.
The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.
And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.
How many crypto people (with legitimate backgrounds just like the founders of Polymarket and Kalshi) stood up and said big things about freedom and the unbanked etc., turns out they were literally just scamming people- there are so many examples besides FTX.
Letting people bet on any random thing is not at all related to this "price everything" theory. If that was their real goal they wouldn't behave so much like a normal sports betting company. I have yet to actually hear anyone defend their actual actions in a plausible way.
In other words, prediction markets require suckers to lose money to insiders in order for the public to learn new information. In this case, people lost over a million dollars to an insider so the public could learn that "d4vd" was searched a lot.
Is this good?
And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
Which is to say: prediction markets can still work and be worthwhile to participate in, even if everyone in them is rational. They don't require suckers.
But, in practice, they certainly do seem to attract them.
Polymarket might be different, but conventional Vegas-style lines change with the amount of $$ bet, if the pool is $50M and an insider bets $10k on the long shot, the line isn't moving -- I don't see how insider information can be surfaced in this scenario except after the fact (and only maybe then).
In other words, if the line changes enough to signal insider info, it's not really insider info anymore.
And yes, the whole purpose of prediction markets is to turn insider info into public info.
Maybe I'm just not getting it, could you lay out a scenario?
Because the prediction market community is filled with liars and fraudsters, of course, it does seem to be common knowledge that this restriction isn't meant to be taken seriously, much like Polymarket's fake rule that Americans aren't allowed to use it.
But once you start from the premise that everything prediction markets say about their rules and practices is a lie, why should we believe they provide any genuine signal for anything?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1jki1lj/pol...
https://xkcd.com/1570/
Not much in between. The efficient market hypothesis claims many victims.
When will the white house insiders see the same fate?
See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/us/how-prediction-markets...
Maybe there’s a chance he can get pardoned before 2029 lol
- Paul Newman
Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polymarket-ceo-shayne-coplan-on...