The U.S. Department of Justice announced criminal charges Thursday against a 38-year-old active-duty Army soldier accused of exploiting classified access to a secret U.S. military operation to illegally profit hundreds of thousands of dollars via an online prediction betting platform.
Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a resident of Fayetteville, North Carolina, faces five felony counts stemming from his alleged bets on Polymarket, a popular crypto-based prediction market. Court documents allege Van Dyke, who participated in planning and executing the U.S. mission to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, placed wagers on two key outcomes: that U.S. forces would enter Caracas and that Maduro would be removed from power. When the operation launched on January 3, which resulted in Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores being arrested and transferred to New York to face federal drug trafficking charges, Van Dyke walked away with more than $400,000 in illicit winnings, prosecutors say.
Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche emphasized the gravity of the alleged misconduct in an official statement. “Our men and women in uniform are entrusted with classified information solely to carry out their national security missions,” Blanche said. “They are strictly prohibited from exploiting this highly sensitive data for personal financial gain.”
In a response to the charges, Polymarket officials confirmed they had proactively flagged the suspicious betting activity to the Department of Justice and fully cooperated with the ongoing investigation. “Insider trading has no place on Polymarket,” the company said in a statement. “Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”
The indictment against Van Dyke is not an isolated incident: it represents the latest confirmed case of insiders leveraging nonpublic information about the second Trump administration’s policy and military actions to profit from prediction market bets. Earlier this year, six unidentified Polymarket accounts netted a combined $1.2 million by correctly betting the U.S. would launch a military strike against Iran on February 28, the exact date open hostilities in the Middle East began. No arrests have been made in that case, and investigators have not uncovered any evidence linking President Donald Trump or senior White House staff to those transactions.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Trump distanced himself from the unregulated prediction betting industry. “The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino… in Europe and every place, they’re doing these betting things,” Trump said. “I was never much in favor of it.”
The charges have reignited long-simmering accusations of systemic conflicts of interest plaguing Trump’s second term in office, particularly centered on connections between Trump’s family and Polymarket itself. Progressive Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders highlighted these concerns in a post Thursday on the social platform X, arguing that the Trump family has amassed $4 billion in unethical income during his time in office, calling the situation an “unprecedented kleptocracy.”
Previous incidents have already raised alarms about potential insider trading tied to the White House: in March, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that talks with Iran were “very productive,” a statement that triggered a drop in global oil prices and a surge in equity markets. Market analysts calculated that traders who placed positioned in oil and stock futures in advance of the post earned tens of millions of dollars in profits. The Trump family has also earned hundreds of millions of dollars from cryptocurrency investments, a sector Trump has moved to deregulate since returning to office. Most notably, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is a partner at private equity firm 1789 Capital, which made a multimillion-dollar investment in Polymarket in 2024. Following the investment, Polymarket named Trump Jr. as a company advisor.
If convicted on all five charges — one count of wire fraud, one count of unlawful monetary transaction, and three counts of violating the Commodity Exchange Act — Van Dyke faces a maximum sentence of 50 years in federal prison.