A US Army master sergeant who was part of the special forces team that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January has been arrested and charged with using classified knowledge of that very mission to make winning bets on a crypto-powered prediction market, Polymarket, pocketing just over $409,000 in the process.
The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment on Thursday charging Gannon Ken Van Dyke, 38, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, with five federal offenses: unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and an unlawful monetary transaction.
He was presented before a US magistrate judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina on Thursday, and his case has been assigned to a federal judge in the Southern District of New York.
Van Dyke had been stationed at Fort Bragg, the North Carolina base that serves as headquarters for the Joint Special Operations Command, the unit overseeing America’s most elite special mission units. According to CBS News, Van Dyke was a communications specialist supporting that command and has been on active duty since 2008, attaining the rank of master sergeant in 2023.
What the indictment says he did in detail
Starting in early December 2025, Van Dyke was given access to classified details about a covert US military operation codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve, a mission to locate and apprehend Maduro on Venezuelan soil. According to prosecutors, rather than treating that information as the national security secret it was, he saw a financial opportunity in it.
On December 26, Van Dyke created an account on Polymarket, a prediction market platform where users buy and sell contracts tied to the likelihood of real-world events, with payouts determined by whether those events actually happen.
Between December 27 and the evening of January 26, he placed 13 separate bets across four markets, all of them wagering that US military forces would be active in Venezuela, that Maduro would be out of power, that a full US invasion would occur, or that President Trump would invoke war powers against Venezuela, all by January 31, 2026. His total stake across those positions came to around $33,000.
The indictment notes that Van Dyke started cautiously, making several relatively small purchases of “yes” shares under $100 apiece, before sharply escalating, placing more than $26,000 worth of bets on January 2 alone, the day before the operation went live.
In the early hours of January 3, US forces entered Caracas and apprehended Maduro and his wife at a private residence. Maduro was transported to the USS Iwo Jima and later brought to New York to face federal drug-trafficking charges.
Hours after the operation concluded, President Trump publicly announced it, and Polymarket’s Venezuela-related contracts were resolved in Van Dyke’s favor. His $33,000 in bets had grown to roughly $409,881.
Among the positions Van Dyke held was a single $32,537 bet that Maduro would be out of office by January 31, a wager that returned a 1,242 percent profit of $404,222 on its own.
The cover-up didn’t go smoothly. Van Dyke withdrew most of his winnings from Polymarket the same day the operation became public news and moved the funds through a foreign cryptocurrency vault before routing them into a newly opened online brokerage account.
But media reports and social media chatter about suspiciously timed trades in the Maduro markets surfaced almost immediately. Realizing he had drawn attention, Van Dyke contacted Polymarket on January 6 and asked the platform to delete his account, falsely claiming he had been locked out of the email address he registered with.
That same day, he swapped the email tied to his crypto exchange account for one created under a different name, one he had quietly set up back on December 14, more than a week before he even opened his Polymarket account.
Investigators also noted that a photograph taken the day of the operation showed Van Dyke on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima, dressed in military fatigues and carrying a rifle alongside other service members, placing him directly at the scene.
A first for prediction markets and a warning shot
This marks the first time the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulator that oversees derivatives and futures markets, has brought charges under the so-called “Eddie Murphy Rule,” a provision that bars trading on misappropriated government information.
The rule gets its nickname from the 1983 film Trading Places, in which characters use stolen government crop reports to corner a commodity market. Polymarket, operated by Blockratize Inc., said it identified the suspicious trading and referred the matter to the DOJ before cooperating fully with the investigation.
“Insider trading has no place on Polymarket,” the company said in a statement. “Today’s arrest is proof the system works.” Its chief legal officer added on X that Polymarket accounts are not anonymous, and that users who believe otherwise are mistaken.
Van Dyke is not the first person charged over classified-information trades on the platform. Israeli authorities arrested and charged two individuals in February over suspected use of military intelligence to place bets on Polymarket related to Israeli operations in Iran.
The charges against Van Dyke carry serious maximum penalties. The three commodities fraud counts each carry up to 10 years in prison, the wire fraud charge carries up to 20 years, and the unlawful monetary transaction charge carries up to 10 years. Those are statutory maximums, actual sentencing, if convicted, would be at the judge’s discretion.
When asked by reporters about Van Dyke’s arrest on Thursday, President Trump compared the situation to Pete Rose betting on his own baseball team. He also said he would “look into it” while noting that prediction markets had turned the world into “somewhat of a casino.” Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Polymarket and its US-based competitor Kalshi.
On Wednesday, Kalshi separately suspended three congressional candidates from Minnesota, Texas and Virginia for alleged insider trading activity on their own campaigns.