Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad, escorted by heavily armed Federal agents as they make their way into an armored car en route to a Federal courthouse in Manhattan on Jan. 5, 2026 in New York City.
Xny/star Max | Gc Images | Getty Images
A U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant was arrested for allegedly using classified information to make extremely profitable bets on the Polymarket prediction market related to the American military mission that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the Department of Justice said Thursday.
The sergeant, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, “was involved in the planning and execution of Operation Absolute Resolve,” which apprehended Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in early January, the DOJ said.
Van Dyke, 38, wagered a total of about $33,000 in 13 or so bets in the week leading up to that operation, with the knowledge that the United States was secretly planning military action against Maduro, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The bets won Van Dyke nearly $410,000, the indictment alleges.
His arrest comes as Polymarket and Kalshi have grown in popularity and as concerns have grown about people with inside information making wagers on those prediction market platforms.
Polymarket, in a statement, said, “Last month, we published our enhanced market integrity rules to combat insider trading.”
“When we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation,” the company said. “Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”
Van Dyke had been stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which houses U.S. military special forces involved in the capture of Maduro and his wife.
He is expected to be presented on Thursday evening to a magistrate judge in federal court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
Van Dyke is charged with three counts of violating the Commodity Exchange Act, one count of wire fraud, and one count of unlawful monetary transaction. He faces a maximum possible sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted of the top criminal count, wire fraud, and up to 10 years in each of the remaining counts.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, separately charged Van Dyke in a civil complaint for allegedly using classified nonpublic information to make the wagers related to the Maduro capture mission.
Both the criminal and civil cases against Van Dyke were filed in Manhattan federal court — the same courthouse where Maduro is charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and weapons charges, and where Flores is charged with cocaine conspiracy and weapons counts.
The criminal indictment says that Van Dyke became involved in the planning of the Maduro mission on Dec. 8, and that on Dec. 26, he created a Polymarket account and began trading on markets related to questions about Maduro and Venezuela.
The indictment against Van Dyke says he made his bets on Polymarket between Dec. 27 and Jan. 2, the eve of the raid on Caracas that ended with Maduro’s apprehension.
All of those wagers took a “YES” position on contracts that said U.S. forces would be in Venezuela by Jan. 31, 2026; that Maduro would be out of office by that date; that the U.S would invade that country by Jan. 31; or that President Donald Trump would invoke the War Powers Act against the country by that date, the indictment says.
Read more CNBC politics coverage
After his bets paid off, netting him a return of twelve times the amount he wagered, Van Dyke allegedly sent most of his winnings to a foreign cryptocurrency vault before depositing them into a new online brokerage account, the DOJ said.
When news outlets reported unusual trading in Maduro-related contracts on Polymarket — which matched the amounts detailed in the indictment wagered and won by Van Dyke — “Van Dyke then took steps to conceal his identity as the trader in the Maduro- and Venezuela-related markets,” the DOJ said.
“On or about January 6, 2026, for example, Van Dyke asked Polymarket to delete his Polymarket account, falsely claiming that he had lost access to the email address to which the account had been associated,” the DOJ said.
“That same day, Van Dyke changed the email registered to his cryptocurrency exchange account to an email address that was not subscribed to in his name, and which he had created on or about December 14, 2025.”
Trump, when asked by a reporter at the White House on Thursday about Van Dyke’s arrest and other cases of suspected insider trading on prediction markets, said, “You know the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.”
“And you look at what’s going on all over the world, in Europe and every place, they’re doing these betting things,” Trump said. “I was never much in favor of it. I don’t like it conceptually, but it is what it is … I’m not happy with any of that stuff.”
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is “both an investor in and an unpaid adviser to Polymarket, and a paid adviser to Kalshi, the two biggest prediction markets,” The New York Times noted in a report in January.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a statement on Van Dyke’s arrest, said, “Our men and women in uniform are trusted with classified information in order to accomplish their mission as safely and effectively as possible, and are prohibited from using this highly sensitive information for personal financial gain.”
“Widespread access to prediction markets is a relatively new phenomenon, but federal laws protecting national security information fully apply,” Blanche said.