3 congressional candidates fined and banned after getting caught betting on elections

Kalshi, a so-called prediction market that allows betting on events, said it caught three candidates for federal office after they attempted to place trades on their own elections.

In a press release on Wednesday, Kalshi's Bobby DeNault touted the enforcement actions as proof of a "commitment to policing all types of unfair or improper trading on our platform."

DeNault said that candidates from Minnesota, Texas, and Virginia had violated the exchange's rules.

Without naming the candidates, the press release revealed that a candidate in Minnesota's 2nd Congressional District Democratic primary "traded a small amount on the outcome of his own election." The candidate agreed to pay a $539.85 fine and was suspended from the platform for five years.

A Texas Republican was preemptively blocked from trading in his primary race for the state's 21st Congressional District. The candidate paid a $784.20 fine and accepted a 5-year suspension.

In the third case, a Virginia Democrat allegedly bet on who would run for public office. And after his candidacy for U.S. Senate was announced, he placed a trade on himself to win the Democratic primary.

The Virginia candidate faced a $6,229.30 fine and a five-year suspension from trading on the Kalshi platform.

"Regardless of the size of a trade, political candidates who can influence a market based on whether they stay in or out of a race violate our rules," Kalshi insisted. "No matter how small the size of the trade, any trade that is found to have violated our exchange rules will be punished."

Kalshi kept the candidates unnamed in its press release, but named them in regulatory filings to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which NPR's Bobby Allyn obtained on Wednesday. He identified the three candidates as Ezekiel Enriquez, a Republican who ran for a House seat in Texas and bet less than $100 on his own candidacy; Minnesota state Sen. Matt Klein, a Democrat; and Mark Moran, an independent Virginia U.S. Senate candidate.

Earlier this week, the BBC reported on suspicions of insider trading in the Trump administration after finding a pattern of "spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public."

There have been no reports of fines, suspensions, or other enforcement measures connected to those trades.

President Donald Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., has ties to the two major prediction markets. He is an investor and sits on the advisory board at Polymarket. At Kalshi, he acts as a strategic advisor.