You can't make this stuff up. A veteran White House staffer who spent a decade staring at Donald Trump’s speeches decided to turn those prepared remarks into a personal piggy bank.
Gabriel Perez, Trump's longtime teleprompter operator and a trusted hand since 2016, is now out of a job and staring down a federal investigation. He allegedly used his privileged access to the president’s speeches to rack up over $100,000 in winnings on the prediction platform Kalshi.
It’s the first time we’ve seen an active White House staffer get caught allegedly abusing insider access for prediction market gold. But honestly, if you've been watching how fast these platforms are growing, you knew this kind of scandal was inevitable.
The Ultimate Inside Track
Perez wasn’t just a random technician. He was a Deputy Assistant to the President and a technical adviser making a comfortable $175,000 salary. In Trump's orbit, he was the guy trusted to navigate the president's famous rhetorical detours, ad-libs, and sudden mid-speech shifts. Because of that trust, Perez was always part of the incredibly tight circle that got eyes on the president’s prepared text before he stepped up to the podium.
He reportedly realized that this early access was worth a fortune on Kalshi's "mention markets".
For the uninitiated, mention markets let traders bet on whether a public figure will utter specific words, phrases, or topics during a major address. Perez allegedly spent a three-month period placing highly specific wagers on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches. We are talking about major moments: the State of the Union address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and a March Medal of Honor ceremony.
But here is where the story gets wild. Because Trump is notoriously unpredictable, Perez couldn’t just place his bets and walk away. Sources close to the matter say he was actively monitoring the speeches in real-time, sometimes adjusting or ditching his bets mid-delivery when Trump started veering off-script.
How the House Caught the Player
You might think a $100,000 betting spree would slide under the radar in a market that trades hundreds of millions of dollars. It didn’t.
Kalshi's internal surveillance team noticed highly unusual, irregular betting patterns on these mention markets. When they dug into the account responsible, they discovered the trader was a federal employee. Kalshi quickly locked down the account, freezing about $90,000 of his profits, and handed the findings over to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
"Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation," confirmed Robert DeNault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement.
The White House reacted swiftly. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Perez is no longer employed at the White House, calling the situation "deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace".
Prediction Markets Have a Serious Insider Trading Problem
This isn't an isolated incident. As prediction platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket explode into multi-billion-dollar ecosystems, they are attracting a lot of people with non-public information.
Consider what has happened just this year:
- The Military Bet: A Special Forces soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, was arrested for allegedly using classified details about a raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to win $400,000 on Polymarket.
- Politicians Betting on Themselves: Kalshi had to fine and suspend three congressional candidates who were caught wagering on their own election outcomes.
- The George Santos Probe: Regulators are looking into whether disgraced former Congressman George Santos used inside knowledge to bet on his own attendance at the State of the Union.
The reality is that prediction markets occupy a strange legal space. They look like gambling, but regulators like the CFTC treat them as derivatives exchanges. The White House even issued an internal warning memo back in March explicitly telling staffers not to use non-public information to trade on these platforms.
Clearly, some people didn't get the memo. Or they just thought they wouldn't get caught.
The Rules of the Game are Changing
If you trade on prediction platforms, don't expect the wild west to last forever. The SEC and CFTC are aggressively scaling up their surveillance of these markets.
The immediate takeaways are clear:
- Surveillance is real: Platforms like Kalshi are actively monitoring accounts for unusual trading behavior. If you have access to proprietary, governmental, or corporate data, trying to monetize it on a prediction market is an easy way to get flagged.
- Expect stricter compliance: Companies and government agencies are going to start treating prediction market trading the same way they treat traditional stock trading.
- The settlement route: Perez is currently in active talks with CFTC regulators to resolve the allegations. How his case is resolved will set a massive precedent for how insider trading in prediction markets is punished moving forward.
The days of making easy money off of what you hear behind closed doors are officially over.
