Kalshi CEO says public trades put misconduct in plain sight

Kalshi’s chief executive, Tarek Mansour, said the public visibility of prediction-market trading can make misconduct easier to find, even as rising transaction volumes complicate surveillance. Speaking at DC Fintech Week, he called the combination of high volumes and public trading information a “blessing and a curse for prediction markets.”

Mansour argued that suspicious trades can be spotted by both platform monitoring systems and market participants, who can then flag them. “You’re committing crime in broad daylight,” he said, arguing that this visibility makes such activity easier to police.

He pointed to George Santos’s trading on a contract about whether the former congressman would attend the 2026 State of the Union. Mansour said Kalshi received about 100 complaints shortly after the activity became apparent, and that the reports helped the exchange identify and investigate the transactions.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Oct. 14 settled charges against Santos for manipulative activity in a contract whose underlying event he controlled. Between Feb. 12 and Feb. 25, Santos traded while posting on social media about his attendance plans. The regulator found those posts included material misrepresentations and omissions, moving prices in a direction favourable to his positions and producing more than $17,500 in profit.

Santos was ordered to give up about $17,570 in profits, pay a $17,500 civil penalty and accept a three-year trading ban. The Block and NPR separately reported that Kalshi had permanently barred Santos from its platform; NPR said the exchange also fined him more than $70,000.

Mansour said Kalshi has introduced mandatory employer disclosures to help identify traders who may have sensitive information about events covered by its contracts. Its compliance programme also applies additional checks to activity involving government decisions, corporate announcements and other events where a participant could know an outcome before it becomes public.

The CFTC has said designated contract markets must maintain audit trails, conduct surveillance and enforce rules against prohibited practices, while the agency retains authority to police illegal conduct on such markets. In an advisory, it cited Kalshi action against a political candidate who appeared to trade on his own candidacy in May 2025, resulting in a $2,246 penalty and a five-year suspension, and against a YouTube-channel editor who likely had advance access to video information, resulting in a $20,398 penalty and a two-year suspension.

The regulator issued a separate Oct. 14 order against Gabriel Perez, a White House teleprompter operator who traded presidential mention contracts after accessing speeches before delivery. Perez was ordered to disgorge about $107,539, pay a $65,000 penalty and accept a three-year trading ban; the CFTC credited KalshiEX with assisting that investigation.

The surveillance challenge differs from conventional equities markets, according to an August analysis published through Harvard Law School’s corporate-governance forum. In prediction markets, nonpublic information may concern the contract’s outcome itself, creating an incentive to trade immediately and potentially making post-resolution review particularly important. Contracts trade between $0 and $1, meaning price levels represent implied probabilities and can make conventional measures of materiality or simple win-rate analysis less useful.