President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez has been placed on unpaid leave and will no longer work at the White House after federal regulators launched an insider trading investigation into his activity on the prediction market platform Kalshi. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is probing whether Perez used advance knowledge of Trump’s speeches to profit from so called “mention markets”, contracts that allow users to bet on specific words or phrases the president will utter during public appearances. Kalshi’s surveillance team flagged the trades and referred them to the CFTC before Perez could withdraw more than $90,000 in profits, which remain frozen on the platform. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the president is aware of the matter and that Perez is cooperating with investigators, though she said she did not know whether other staffers had access to prediction markets on government devices.
The case exposes a vulnerability that prediction markets have grappled with since exploding in popularity, the people closest to outcomes are often the ones best positioned to exploit them. Kalshi’s mention markets are tailor made for this risk, allowing wagers on whether a public figure will say a particular word during a speech, broadcast, or earnings call. For a teleprompter operator, especially one as embedded as Perez, who has worked with Trump for a decade, is among the highest paid White House staffers at $175,000 annually, and is often the last person to see the president’s remarks before delivery, such markets present an almost irresistible arbitrage. The White House had warned staff against exactly this in a March 24 memo stating that misuse of nonpublic information for financial gain “will not be tolerated,” yet the safeguards clearly failed to prevent the alleged scheme. Kalshi had already moved to tighten its defenses, announcing in June that it would mandate employment disclosures for users trading sensitive contracts and launch a whistleblower portal. The platform’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, said the surveillance team “promptly flagged and referred these trades” after an internal investigation that included an interview with Perez and reports from market makers who spotted irregularities.
Perez is not the first to face scrutiny for exploiting privileged access on prediction markets, but he is the first known White House employee caught in the crosshairs. In April, a US Army Special Forces soldier was charged with using classified information about a raid targeting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to win over $400,000 on Polymarket. That same month, Kalshi fined and suspended three congressional candidates for betting on their own election races. A Google employee was charged after allegedly earning $1.2 million using insider knowledge about the company’s Year in Search data. The CFTC, under Trump appointee Chairman Mike Selig, has pledged to crack down on such abuse while simultaneously championing the industry’s growth, a tension that grows more acute as trading volumes surge into the hundreds of millions. The agency is now drafting rules to ban wagers on wars, terror attacks, and assassinations as not serving the public interest, while also targeting sports injuries and other events vulnerable to spot fixing. For Perez, the consequence is immediate unemployment and a federal investigation. For the prediction market industry, the episode is another reminder that legitimacy at scale requires more than surveillance algorithms, it demands that the people with the inside track be kept far from the betting window.
