Robert DeNault, head of enforcement at Kalshi, joins CBS News to discuss last week's appeals court ruling that rejected the company's efforts to stop Nevada from regulating speculation on sporting events on its platform.
Page F6From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Prediction market bans an ex-congressman for suspicious trades, then suspends a candidate for betting on his own race
As it ran on the front
Three filings crossed the desk this week from the same prediction market. First: Kalshi banned former congressman George Santos for life, citing suspicious trades. Second: the company suspended a sitting Republican House candidate in North Carolina, this one for placing bets on his own race. Third: a Kalshi official issued a statement responding to an oversight ruling against the company itself. Lay the three side by side on the ledger and they do not reconcile to the same number.
A lifetime ban is a permanent entry. A suspension is a temporary one. Both men are accused of the same category of conduct — wagering on outcomes they had a hand in deciding. The penalty column does not match the conduct column, and when a penalty column does not match a conduct column, the gap has to live somewhere. Here it lives in the calendar: the ban landed on a former officeholder already out of office and already a punchline, low cost to the house. The suspension landed on a sitting candidate mid-race, the kind of figure a platform courts for future volume.…
…(cont) None of this required speculation. It required only running Kalshi's own three announcements against each other and noting that the exchange doing the banning is the same exchange that let both bets get placed to begin with, and that faced its own oversight finding the same week. A company can be the cop and the house at once. It cannot be surprised when the numbers from that arrangement come out uneven.
The oversight ruling itself is worth a line on its own ledger: a federal or exchange body found something wrong enough to rule on, and the company's own official had to go on record about it. That is not a rumor. That is a ruling, a statement, and a timestamp, all sitting in the same week as two separate bans for betting on yourself.
Nobody at the exchange called any of this suspicious in their own copy. They called it life for one, suspension for the other, and a statement for themselves. The reconciliation is simple, hon: same conduct, different columns. In a regulated market, that is the finding. The rest is just who was still useful to the house when the ruling came down.
“One guy gets banned for life, the other guy — same company, same season — gets a timeout. That's not justice, that's triage for who's still useful to the house. Ask who set the odds on that.”
“Look, the exchange is self-policing, that's the free market working exactly as designed — actually, both of these were violations the company let happen for months before it acted, so, that's — that's not quite the talking point I meant to give you.”
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.
Prediction market Kalshi has suspended GOP House candidate Laurie Buckhout from its platform for three years, after it determined she wagered on her own race. After launching her candidacy in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.