Leah Feiger: All right. Do you guys remember George Santos?
Brian Barrett: How could I forget?
Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely do, but wow, did not expect we would be talking about him again this soon, I have to say.
Leah Feiger: Former US representative expelled from Congress in 2023, accused of fraud and theft, and doing it with such a plum that the story just couldn’t help but take national news by storm.
Brian Barrett: I want to be clear too. He wasn’t just accused, he went to jail.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I was going to say very credibly accused.
Leah Feiger: Anyways, he’s back in the headlines this week. On Monday we learned that Santos was hit with a lifetime ban from prediction market platform Kalshi, and a $71,000 fine, allegedly for trying to manipulate a bet on whether he’d show up to Trump’s State of the Union. To tell us all the full details, we are joined by WIRED senior correspondent Kate Knibbs.
Kate Knibbs: Hi guys, how are you doing?
Leah Feiger: Kate, so happy that you’re here. Can you take us through my favorite story of the week?
Kate Knibbs: I would love to tell you guys about this. And I will say, I feel similarly like Santos, yes, he does do crimes but he does them with such flare that it’s hard to hate him.
Zoë Schiffer: It’s a bad thing that’s very fun to watch.
Kate Knibbs: Yes. So Santos, at this point when this all begins, he’s already expelled from Congress, already gone to jail. He’s out of jail, he’s making Cameo videos for money, he’s doing his thing. So, he posts that he will be attending the State of the Union. And then, while the State of the Union is going on, he posts that he’s actually stuck at the airport and he’s not attending it. And then he says, “FML.” There was a market on Kalshi about whether Santos was going to attend the State of the Union, and someone made a bunch of money off of it. And Kalshi quickly figured out that it was him because Kalshi has know your customer requirements. His identity was not a secret to them, it was not hard for them to check and see that the person who made money was George Santos.
Leah Feiger: Awesome.
Kate Knibbs: And it’s against their rules to place trades or wagers on events that you’re a participant in. It’s like market manipulation, insider trading, whatever. So even before this happened this week, the CFTC actually also knew about this because Kalshi told them, and they already fined him money for this specific incident. What happened this week was apparently there was this back and forth between Santos and Kalshi, and they fined him $71,000 and then weren’t going to lifetime ban him. The same day that they announced the Santos thing, they announced a few other politicians who got in trouble for betting on themselves, and those politicians got much smaller fines and temporary bans.