Platforms that allow people to bet on real-world outcomes are struggling to keep cheaters out, and problems are piling up quickly.
Calcci, one of the largest prediction market platforms in the United States, announced on Wednesday that it had fined and suspended three candidates running for office after they bet on their elections.
The company said the three were Matt Klein, a Democratic senator from Minnesota who was seeking a nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives; Ezekiel Enriquez, a Republican who ran in the primary for Texas’ 21st District; and Mark Moran, an independent candidate for Senate in Virginia.
Kalshi said the cases had been arrested Through new safeguards recently put in place by the company to prevent political candidates from trading on their own contests.
The punishments were not light.
Fines ranged from $539 to more than $6,200, and all three were banned from using the platform for five years. Klein said sorry for his $50 bet, calling it a mistake.
But Moran was frank about his intentions. He said he bet himself $100 on purpose, specifically to get caught, because he wanted to show that “any candidate with enough money” could move these markets and that entire elections could be effectively bought.
Klein and Enriquez settled their case, but Moran repeatedly refused to cooperate, which is why his penalty reached $6,229.30, Calci said.
Lawmakers and associations are backing down
State legislators have begun to respond.
California last month banned state officials from using inside knowledge to bet on platforms like Kalshi and its rival Polymarket.
Governor of New York Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Prevent state employees from doing the same.
“Getting rich by betting on inside information is corruption, pure and simple,” Hochul said.
At the federal level, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has claimed broad authority over these markets, but several states have filed their own civil cases, arguing that the platforms violate state gambling laws.
The problems don’t stop at politics. Professional sports are now part of the picture as well.
The day before the 2026 NFL Draft, on April 22, the NFL sent a formal reminder to both Calcio and Polymarket, asking them not to make what the league called “rejected bets.”
The league specifically cited direct draft pick contracts as posing a significant risk, since draft picks often circulate on social media before teams officially announce them.
Despite the warning, Calci was still running 127 separate markets tied to the draft, all of which carried the risk that people within the league could actually know the results before anyone else did.
Weak prediction markets
Perhaps the strangest case of manipulation came from France.
like Cryptopolitan reported earlier todayFrench media claimed that a Polymarket trader had interfered with a weather sensor at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to win a weather-based bet.
According to reports, the trader used a hand dryer on a Météo France sensor to raise the temperature above 21 degrees Celsius, pocketing nearly $34,000.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented on the incident, saying: Prediction markets need to move away From relying on a single data source that can be manipulated by virtually anyone.
While both platforms are dealing with these issues, their order of business is changing.
After leading the prediction market for years, Polymarket has now fallen behind in terms of trading volume, According to Dune Analytics.
The shift comes in the wake of a series of internal issues, including technical glitches, a controversial fee adjustment, and platform-wide service outages.
By contrast, Calci has benefited from the turmoil, recently reaching $22 billion in value on the back of new financing. Polymarket’s transaction volume in March was only one-twentieth of Kalshi’s
As the two companies fight for users and push to operate legally in all 50 states, they face the same basic problem: how to prevent the people and events they are trying to predict from tilting the outcome in their favor.
