A former White House teleprompter operator has been ordered to pay more than $172,000 (\u00a3127,000) for using inside information to bet<\/b>\u00a0<\/b>on Donald Trump’s speeches.<\/b><\/p>\n
Gabriel Perez was found to have made trades concerning what the US president would say during addresses between December 2025 and February 2026 on Kalshi – a prediction markets platform where users can bet on real-world events.<\/p>\n
Its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said Perez would have to surrender profits of $107,539.02 and pay a civil penalty of $65,000.<\/p>\n
The White House has not yet commented. In July,\u00a0then-press secretary Karoline Leavitt said<\/a>\u00a0Perez was on unpaid leave and would not return to his post.<\/p>\n Announcing the settlement on Friday, the CFTC said Perez had “misappropriated” his prior knowledge of Trump’s speeches to place bets “in breach of his duty of trust and confidence”.<\/p>\n It said his civil penalty had been reduced due to his “exemplary co-operation” with the investigation.<\/p>\n Perez has also been banned from trading for three years.<\/p>\n Kalshi’s lead lawyer Bobby DeNault welcomed the decision, writing on X: “It doesn’t matter who you are: violate our rules or federal law and you will face the consequences.”<\/p>\n The company previously told the BBC that its analysts had noticed unusual betting on “mention markets” \u2013 contracts through which users predict whether a speaker will use common terms, such as specific countries, campaign slogans or words \u2013 in March.<\/p>\n It said it had used account data to find that the user had been a federal employee operating White House teleprompters, and reported the activity to the regulator.<\/p>\n “The words of political leaders like presidents and Fed chairs cause billions of dollars of movement in FX markets, oil futures [and] the stock market,” it said in a statement in July.<\/p>\n The same month, the White House Management Office had sent a letter to aides telling them not to place bets on prediction markets, administration officials told the BBC’s US media partner CBS News.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"