Kalshi bans ex-congressman George Santos from prediction platform for life

George Santos, the former Republican congressman whose political career collapsed under a mountain of lies, has become the first person ever handed a lifetime ban by the prediction-market platform Kalshi.The company announced the permanent suspension on Monday, along with a $71,356 fine, after federal regulators accused Santos of profiting from bets tied to his own attendance at Donald Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year.A Kalshi spokeswoman said Santos’s refusal to cooperate fully with the platform’s internal investigation was what pushed the penalty from temporary to permanent.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) alleges that Santos exploited stormy weather forecasts that threatened to disrupt his travel to Washington in February. According to the agency, he bought Kalshi contracts betting he would miss the speech, then posted social media updates suggesting he planned to attend after all, driving up the value of contracts he held on the opposite outcome and allowing him to cash out at a profit. Regulators concluded he had improperly traded on an event whose outcome he had some power to influence himself.Santos responded on X, thanking Kalshi for the ban. “Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for,” he said.Santos was expelled from the House in December 2023 after the ethics committee found substantial evidence he had defrauded donors, lied about his finances and fabricated much of his biography. He later pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud and identity theft charges and was sentenced to more than seven years in prison, serving less than three months before Trump commuted the sentence.Santos agreed in July to pay more than $35,000 to settle the CFTC’s case, without admitting wrongdoing, according to his attorney. That settlement also barred him from trading on any platform for three years, a far lighter penalty than the lifetime ban Kalshi has now added on top.The disgraced representative was not the only person disciplined by Kalshi on Monday. Laurie Buckhout, a Trump-endorsed Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina, was banned for three years and fined $2,590 after wagering under $1,000 on her own campaign, calling it a mistake she moved to fix as soon as she noticed it. The former Planet Fitness president Ben Midgley was banned for three years and fined $5,434.30 over bets on his unsuccessful bid in Maine’s Republican gubernatorial primary, and Diamond Resorts founder Stephen Cloobeck received a three-year ban and roughly $31,770 fine for wagering around $10,000 on his own abandoned run for California governor.The action follows a separate CFTC penalty last week against Gabriel Perez, a White House teleprompter operator accused of trading on inside information, who agreed to pay $65,000 and forfeit more than $107,000 in winnings.The ban arrives as Santos has been working to rebuild his public profile and finances. He is set to appear this month on the latest season of Fox’s endurance competition “Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test”, and has been supplementing his income through paid video shout-outs on Cameo, whose price has reportedly dropped from $300 to $100 as he works to pay down campaign debts once estimated above $800,000.He has said he does not plan to seek public office again for at least a decade.