Polymarket removed a forum related to the rescue mission of U.S. military servicemembers amid political pressure, the latest sign of mounting scrutiny around prediction markets.
U.S. and Iranian military forces are searching for a missing American airman after its F-15E fighter jet was shot down over Iran on Friday. One crew member has been rescued, but another is not accounted for.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., decried the Polymarket page that allowed users to bet on which day the U.S. would confirm the rescue of the two airmen after an American F-15E fighter jet was shot down over Iran. The lawmaker called the page “DISGUSTING” in an X post.
“They could be your neighbor, a friend, a family member,” Moulton wrote on Friday. “And people are betting on whether or not they’ll be saved.”
In a response on X, Polymarket said: “We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards.”
“It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards,” Polymarket wrote.
In a separate X post, Polymarket said it doesn’t “make money or charge any fees on any geopolitical markets.”
In an email to CNBC, Moulton said, “Polymarket didn’t take that market down because it violated their standards. They took it down because we called them out.”
Moulton also said that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has the authority to regulate prediction market platforms, but it is doing nothing.
“That needs to change, too,” he said. “Yesterday, there were 219 active bets in Polymarket’s ‘war’ category. Today, there are 223. This is spreading, and Congress needs to act.”
Moulton last month banned his staff from using prediction market platforms like Polymarket or Kalshi, a policy that his office believes is the first of its kind in Congress.
“Constituents that we serve should trust us to make decisions based on the right thing for do for our nation, not based on how bets might turn out,” Moulton said Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Moulton also said on X that Donald Trump Jr., the son of President Donald Trump, “is an investor in this dystopian death market and may have access to intelligence that isn’t public yet.”
Requests for comment from Trump Jr. weren’t immediately returned to CNBC.
The Massachusetts lawmaker is part of a growing chorus of voices in Washington calling for stronger oversight of these betting platforms as interest swells.
A group of congressional Democrats introduced legislation late last month that would bar prediction markets from allowing wagers on elections, war and government actions, in addition to sports.
In February, six Democratic senators urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to clarify that it will prohibit any contracts related to an individual’s death. These contracts “present dangerous national security risks,” the lawmakers wrote.
The CFTC on Thursday announced lawsuits against three states over what it saw as efforts to circumvent the organization’s sole regulatory authority over prediction markets.
The NFL has also asked prediction market operators to keep specific event contracts that the league deems “objectionable bets” off their platforms. The league outlined examples of event contracts that could be easily manipulated, inherently objectionable, related to officiating, and knowable in advance — and asked that operators refrain from offering such trades.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan, Azhar Sukri and Luke Fountain contributed to this report.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.
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