US soldier in Maduro raid charged with using classified intel to win $400K Polymarket bet

Washington: A US special forces soldier involved in the military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the mission to win more than $400,000 in an online betting market, federal officials announced Thursday. Gannon Ken Van Dyke was part of the operation to capture Maduro in January and used his access to classified information to make money on the prediction market site Polymarket, the federal prosecutor's office in New York said. He has been charged by the Justice Department with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction. He could face years in prison. Van Dyke, 38, was involved in the planning and execution of capturing Maduro for about a month beginning Dec. 8, 2025, according to the federal prosecutor's office. Yet despite the fact that he signed nondisclosure agreements promising to not divulge "any classified or sensitive information" related to the operations, prosecutors say the Army soldier used this information to make a series of bets related to Venezuelan President Maduro being out of power by Jan. 31, 2026. "This involved a US soldier who allegedly took advantage of his position to profit off of a righteous military operation," FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post to social media. A telephone number listed for Van Dyke in public records was not in service. There was no attorney listed yet for him. Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets in the world, said it had found someone trading on classified government information, alerted the US Department of Justice and "cooperated with their investigation." "Insider trading has no place on Polymarket," the company said in a statement. The federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, announced Thursday it had filed a parallel complaint against Van Dyke. That complaint alleges that Van Dyke moved $35,000 from his personal bank account into a cryptocurrency exchange account on Dec. 26, 2025 - a little over a week before US forces would fly into Caracas and seize Maduro. Van Dyke used more than $32,500 to make a series of bets on whether Maduro would be removed from power between Dec. 11, 2025, and Jan. 31, 2026, according to the complaint. Van Dyke placed those bets between Dec. 30 and Jan. 2, 2026, with the vast majority occurring on the night of Jan. 2 - just hours before the first missiles would fall on Caracas. In the early hours of Jan. 3, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social a photo of the now-captured Venezuelan leader, wearing a gray sweatsuit, protective headphones and a blindfold. The bets Van Dyke made on Maduro leaving power resulted in "more than $404,000 of profits," the complaint said. Bets on three other Venezuela-related contracts netted the solider more than $5,000, according to the complaint. "The defendant was entrusted with confidential information about US operations and yet took action that endangered US national security and put the lives of American service members in harm's way," Michael Selig, the commission's chairman, said in a statement. The massive profits from the well-timed bets aroused public attention just days after the raid but Polymarket said nothing to the public at the time. Officials allege that shortly after the operation, Van Dyke put most of the funds he won in a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He also asked Polymarket to delete his account, saying he had lost access to his email associated with the account, according to the federal prosecutor's office. Trump, when asked about the case Thursday, drew parallels between the embattled soldier and late professional baseball player Pete Rose, who was banned from the sport amid accusations that he placed bets on his own team. "The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino, and you look at what's going on all over the world and Europe and every place, they're doing these betting things," Trump told reporters. The Trump administration has been a key ally of the growing prediction market industry in a critical legal fight with states seeking to ban the platforms. The president's eldest son is an adviser for both Kalshi and Polymarket and an investor in the latter. Trump's social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict. Van Dyke joined the Army in 2008 and, in 2023, was promoted to the rank of master sergeant, the second-highest enlisted rank in the Army, according to the indictment. Federal prosecutors confirmed that he was a senior enlisted soldier who was part of the special forces community and was stationed at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina, but their indictment offered little other details about his military service. However, the document says Van Dy