Former Republican congressman and ironic meme icon George Santos was just banned from Kalshi — for life.
It’s the first lifetime ban that the prediction market has ever handed out, the New York Times reports, which is pretty incredible considering all the inside trading that’s suspected to happen on the platform. There was pretty much nothing “suspected” about Santos’ offenses, though, which were about as blatant as they come.
According to a notice Kalshi posted this week, Santos placed multiple bets on markets related to his attendance of president Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February this year.
Needless to say, “as a person capable of influencing the outcome of the underlying event, Santos was prohibited from trading in this market,” the notice explained.
He then began making public statements about attending the event to influence the price of the contracts. Some of those statements were “false or misleading.”
Just days before the address, for example, Santos posted a video on X saying, “I’m going to be there for the State of Union in the gallery, guys,” before writing a follow-up telling his followers he was stuck in an airport, watching it on TV.
“FML,” he added.
Santos’s unsubtle market-moving utterances were successful at manipulating the price of the “Yes or No” contracts he purchased, Kalshi’s Compliance Department found. All told, he made nearly $18,000 in profit from the scheme.
Santos won’t see the inside of a cell, but he is getting a heavy slap on the wrist. Kalshi fined him $71,356, and it also flagged the bets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The federal agency ordered Santos to return all the profits he made as part of a settlement both parties reached in July, and slapped him with its own $17,500 fine for good measure.
Anyone familiar with Santos’s antics won’t be surprised by this latest one. The 38-year-old is a notorious fabulist and con artist. He was expelled from Congress in 2023 after an ethics investigation, following the discovery by news outlets that he’d embezzled campaign funds and had lied heavily in his biography. In 2024, he plead guilty to wire fraud and identity theft. His seven year sentence was commuted by — who else — Trump last year.
Ironically, Santos used to be a paid ambassador for Polymarket, Kalshi’s biggest rival. Polymarket dropped him like a hot potato, though, once the CFTC began poking into his suspicious Kalshi bets.
The ban and hefty fines haven’t caused him to lose his spunk, though.
“Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform,” Santos wrote on X. “Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.”
More on prediction markets: Insider Trading on Polymarket Is Revealing Military Secrets