George Santos faces a lifetime ban from Kalshi after failing to cooperate with the prediction market's investigation into his alleged unlawful trades.
Page A4From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Kalshi bans ex-congressman, suspends GOP candidate for betting on own race, then faces its own oversight ruling.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened here, because the coverage wants to make it sound like chaos and it is, in fact, the system functioning exactly as designed. Kalshi identified suspicious trading activity connected to a former congressman and banned him for life. That's not a scandal, that's compliance working in real time. The market policed itself before anyone had to ask it to. That's the story, full stop.
Then, separately, Kalshi suspended a sitting GOP House candidate for placing bets on his own race, which, again, is the platform catching a conflict of interest before it became a bigger problem. Two enforcement actions in the same cycle isn't evidence of a pattern of problems, it's evidence of a robust monitoring system catching problems as they occur. Did I say catching them as they occur? I mean -- the trades already happened, the bets already got placed, the exposure already existed before anyone flagged it, but the important thing is somebody eventually flagged it.…
…(cont) And now there's an oversight ruling against the company itself, which a Kalshi official has responded to, and look, regulatory review is a normal part of doing business in a new asset class. Prediction markets are new. New things get reviewed. That a company banning a congressman for suspicious trades and benching a candidate for betting on his own election is also, in the same stretch, the subject of an oversight ruling against its own conduct -- that's just three unrelated data points that happen to share a logo.
Actually, let me back up. Those aren't unrelated. They're the same company, the same quarter, and the pattern here is that the platform meant to let the public bet on outcomes keeps needing outside intervention to keep its own house in order. That does undercut the pitch a little. But the core point stands: self-regulation caught two of these before regulators had to. The fact that regulators are also now involved doesn't change that. It just means there's more than one entity watching the same platform, which, again, if you squint, is a feature.
“A betting site bans a guy for insider trades, benches a candidate for wagering on his own election, and then gets a report card from its own regulator -- and somehow that's supposed to reassure us the market's clean.”
“Kalshi caught it themselves, that's the system working. Did I say caught themselves? investigators actually flagged the activity, but self-regulation remains the goal here.”
The receipts
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…
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.