00:00Betting against Jesus coming back last year wouldn't just have made you good money.
00:04You also would have avoided one of the biggest fears in prediction markets right now, insider
00:08trading.
00:09The US raid on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro is just the latest example of dodgy
00:13looking bets.
00:14One new account on Polymarket won more than $400,000 by doubling its bets that Maduro
00:19would be gone before January 31st.
00:22Perhaps it was truly a shot in the dark, but the timing of the bets just a few hours before
00:26the US hit Caracas is certainly strange, and they only began placing the bets in December.
00:32It's not the first time this has happened.
00:34There was a strange bump in Polymarket bets the day before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce
00:40announced their engagement.
00:41Other curiously timed bets have also won big recently, Google Gemini's release dates, the
00:46Nobel Peace Prize and even Michael Saylor's purchase of Bitcoin.
00:50All of this is feeding the perception that these lightly regulated platforms are a financial
00:55wild west.
00:56The suspicions are strong enough that an analytics firm called Polysites has created a tool called
01:01Insider Finder to show new accounts making very large bets.
01:05But Polymarket has said that suspected insiders get outed quickly on social media, and Kalshi
01:10has told Bloomberg News that it explicitly prohibits insider trading.
01:15So what's going on?
01:16The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is supposed to oversee prediction markets, but
01:20it's under-resourced.
01:21And so far, it has allowed pretty unrestrained growth in the scale and type of wages.
01:28Being able to bet with cryptocurrency through anonymous wallets outside the US doesn't help
01:33either.
01:34At the end of the day, online bettors just aren't protected from getting cleaned out by
01:38people in the know the same way they are in stock markets, for example.
01:41Unless, that is, they're betting on an act of God or his son.
01:44Without a
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