The prediction marketplace platform Kalshi has hit former U.S. Congressman George Santos with its first-ever permanent ban.
Page B3From§Eachthe noon edition — 31 August 2026
Ex-congressman George Santos banned for life from betting site after suspicious trades on himself.
As it ran on the front
NORMAN 'GEORGE' SANTOS'S WAGERING PRIVILEGES, born the day a prediction market decided a disgraced former congressman's money spent the same as anyone else's, died this week at Kalshi, banned for life after the exchange flagged suspicious trades placed on Santos's own re-election long-shot bid. The privileges were not old.
They are survived by the underlying question of how a man expelled from the House of Representatives was permitted to open a trading account on a regulated exchange in the first place. They are preceded in death by a run of penny-ante hustles this obituarist does not have room to list in full, though he is tempted to try.…
…(cont) The betting privileges leave behind a prediction market that insists it takes market integrity seriously — a claim the reader is free to weigh against the fact that it took a suspicious pattern of trades on the man's own name before anyone noticed. That is not oversight. That is a company finding out the hard way what everybody else already knew, which is that George Santos, given access to a system with real money moving through it, will find the shortest distance between himself and that money. It is not clairvoyance to see that coming; it is just reading the record.
The lifetime ban is, in fairness, the correct outcome, and this obituarist will not pretend otherwise — a whippersnapper is still a whippersnapper, and the exchange did, eventually, do the right thing. But the record shows the wager was live long enough to clear before anybody asked whether it should have been allowed to place at all, and that gap is where the shit gets interesting: not the ban, the delay.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that regulated betting markets run a background check before opening an account, not after the suspicious trade has already cleared.
“A guy who got thrown out of Congress found a new place to move money around, and it took months before anybody flagged it. The pattern isn't the man, it's that every system he touches waits until the money's already gone before it checks his ID.”
The receipts
George Santos faces a lifetime ban from Kalshi after failing to cooperate with the prediction market's investigation into his alleged unlawful trades.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.