A special operations soldier who helped capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro allegedly bet $33,933 on a prediction market days before the operation was announced and walked away with $409,000 in profit. He then allegedly tried to delete his account and change his cryptocurrency email address to hide the trades. He was arrested Thursday. It is the first time the Department of Justice has prosecuted insider trading on a prediction market.

It will not be the last opportunity to do so unless Congress acts.

The same week Van Dyke's arrest was announced, a separate detail emerged that demands equal scrutiny. Another Polymarket user made approximately $550,000 through a series of bets related to U.S. strikes on Iran and the removal of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. That pattern is identical to what Van Dyke did with Maduro. Someone with apparent foreknowledge of classified military operations placed bets on a prediction market and profited enormously. The DOJ has not announced an arrest in connection with the Iran bets. It has not confirmed whether an investigation is underway. The American public deserves to know whether classified information about the Iran war is also being used to generate personal profit on betting platforms.

The legal framework that allowed Van Dyke's prosecution was a decades-old provision of the Commodities Exchange Act that prosecutors had to stretch to fit a situation the law was never written to address. Prosecutors themselves acknowledged they face a learning curve in explaining how prediction markets work to a jury. That is not a stable foundation for accountability. Congress has not passed explicit legislation prohibiting the use of classified government information to trade on prediction markets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which primarily regulates these platforms, has not established robust insider trading rules specific to them. The gap between what is happening and what the law is equipped to address is wide and growing.

The problem is not limited to one soldier. Federal employees and military personnel have access to classified information about government operations that can move prediction market prices dramatically. When that information can be converted into personal profit on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, it creates financial incentives that are incompatible with the obligations of public service and military duty. A soldier who can make $409,000 by betting on an operation he is participating in has a financial interest in that operation succeeding that goes beyond his oath of service. A government official who knows about a military strike before it happens and can bet on it anonymously has an incentive structure that is fundamentally corrupted.

Trump compared Van Dyke's conduct to Pete Rose betting on his own team. He said he would look into it. That is not sufficient. Congress must act. The CFTC must act. And the DOJ must answer publicly whether the Iran prediction market bets are being investigated with the same urgency as the Maduro bets.

Sign this petition to demand Congress pass explicit federal legislation prohibiting the use of classified government information to trade on prediction markets, ban federal employees and military personnel from participating in prediction markets while holding security clearances, and call on the DOJ and CFTC to publicly confirm whether the $550,000 in Iran-related prediction market bets are under active investigation.