A Polymarket trader made $300,000 betting on Biden’s pardons, a new analysis shows
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A new analysis shows suspected insider trading during the Biden administration. Researchers have discovered that one trader on the site Polymarket made more than $300,000 by making well-timed bets on who former President Biden would pardon at the end of his term. Here's NPR's Bobby Allyn.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: A group of cryptocurrency sleuths in Paris recently stumbled on something that grabbed their attention. In Biden's final hours in office, one trader on the prediction market site Polymarket used two separate accounts to place high-dollar bets on Biden's pardons. Every bet was correct. Nick Vaiman runs the analytics company Bubblemaps.
NICK VAIMAN: One of these two account betted 21,000 on Jim Biden getting pardon, and he got a return of 800%, and he netted $176,000 on this.
ALLYN: That's Jim Biden, the president's brother. Successful wagers were also placed betting that former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger would be pardoned, along with Senator Adam Schiff. None have ever been charged with a crime, but Biden pardoned them preemptively to prevent prosecution by the incoming Trump administration. A month earlier, the same Polymarket trader correctly bet that the former president's son, Hunter Biden, would be pardoned. In all, the trader made $316,000.
JOSHUA MITTS: The odds of this happening by random chance are virtually zero. This indicates the possession of information.
ALLYN: Columbia Law School's Joshua Mitts advises the Department of Justice on insider trading cases. He says whether this information was from a White House insider or access some other way is hard to know. If federal prosecutors wanted to see who might be behind it, they could subpoena the company that controls the cryptocurrency wallet.
MITTS: What you see with these subpoenas, oftentimes is, you know, you'll get back data, and it just shows some entity, and it's just not clear how that entity has any connection to anyone in the White house. That's where the trail runs cold.
ALLYN: There have been Polymarket bets in Trump's second term about the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the killing of Iran's supreme leader and a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran - all led to six-figure profits and very few clues about who made the trades. That's because Polymarket allows anonymous cryptocurrency trading, and its biggest exchange is based in Panama, outside the reach of U.S. regulators. The company didn't return a request for comment.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News.
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