Regime change jackpot
An anonymous individual who made more than $400,000 on Polymarket predicting the ousting of Nicolás Maduro as President of Venezuela has raised multiple alarms of insider trading given the precise timing of the bets.
placed five hours before a surprise US operation snatched Maduro and his wife
The mystery bets were placed five hours before a surprise US operation snatched Maduro and his wife from Caracas, fueling widespread suspicion someone within the hush-hush operation capitalized to make a quick profit.
The Wall Street Journal cited Polymarket data revealing that the mystery trader focused on the-then long shot outcomes that would pay out if Maduro would no longer be Venezuela’s President by January 31.
The trader placed a final bet on Friday at 9:58 pm ET shortly before President Donald Trump ordered the strike. Over 50% of the total bets of $34,000 that earned approximately $410,000 in profit were placed the evening before the attack.
Precision betting
The mystery trader placed their intitial bet on December 27, “buying $96 worth of contracts” on the US attacking Venezuela within a week.
According to the WSJ, the trader escalated the bets over the ensuing week.
As surgical bombing of strategic Venezuelan targets rocked Caracas on Saturday and flooded the world’s media, the contracts for Maduro’s exit spiked in value. The mystery bettor, however, bought the contracts at just 8 cents apiece, “implying that Polymarket users saw only an 8% probability” of Maduro’s fall in January.
That’s a lot of money to put in at that price, without a lot of news”
Founder of a firm supplying analytic tools to Polymarket users, Tre Upshaw, said claims of insider trading are valid. “That’s a lot of money to put in at that price, without a lot of news,” the Polysights executive said.
Reactions
Fenwick & West law firm partner Noah Solowiejczyk told the WSJ that if the person behind the Maduro bets was a US government employee that misused privileged information, the “trader could be prosecuted under existing laws against insider trading in swap contracts.”
Representive Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) said after news of the mystery Polymarket bets, that he soon plans to introduce a bill to “explicitly prohibit federal elected officials, political appointees and executive-branch employees” from trading on prediction markets.
