Gabriel Perez had a job that gave him an unusual advantage: as a White House teleprompter operator, he read President Trump’s prepared speeches before the public ever heard them. The CFTC says he turned that head start into profit. The agency ordered Perez to pay more than $172,000 after finding he traded Kalshi “mention market” contracts tied to the specific words officials would say.
The settlement came through an Aug. 28 consent order. Perez must disgorge $107,539.02 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty, according to The Block. He is also barred from trading on any CFTC-registered entity for three years. Perez consented to the order without admitting the findings.
The timeline was short. Perez opened a Kalshi account on Dec. 8, 2025, and traded between December 2025 and March 2026, the CFTC said. The agency found that he reviewed Trump’s prepared remarks roughly an hour before delivery, then placed trades on mention markets, event contracts that resolve based on whether a public figure says specific words in an address. In practice, Perez could see the answers before the market closed.
Cooperation earned him a break. The CFTC credited Perez with “exemplary cooperation” after he voluntarily sat for an interview and accepted responsibility, granting a roughly 40% reduction on the civil penalty. The agency also credited KalshiEX for its assistance.
“It doesn’t matter who you are: violate our rules or federal law and you will face the consequences,” Robert DeNault, head of enforcement at Kalshi, wrote on X, adding that the exchange’s surveillance unit caught the trading.
This is the CFTC’s second event-contract settlement in four weeks. On July 31, former congressman George Santos agreed to pay about $35,000 over Kalshi trades on a contract asking who would attend February’s State of the Union address. The agency found he made misrepresentations about his own attendance on social media while holding positions in that market. Both orders carry three-year trading bans. Both grew out of Kalshi referrals. The distinction matters. Santos was charged with manipulating a contract under which he had direct influence. Perez was charged with trading on nonpublic information.
That charge is new territory. Federal prosecutors in May charged Google engineer Michele Spagnuolo with using internal search data to make about $1.2 million on Polymarket, and the CFTC filed a parallel civil complaint. House Oversight Chairman James Comer opened a separate probe in May into insider-trading controls at Kalshi and Polymarket, requesting documents on identity verification, geoblocks, and suspicious-activity detection. Both platforms had tightened insider-trading controls in March, adding screening tools and updated conduct rules.
Regulators are moving on multiple fronts. The CFTC has separately proposed a rules framework for prediction markets under Chair Michael Selig. Also on Friday, the Ninth Circuit ruled against Kalshi in its fight with Nevada gaming regulators, holding that the company had not shown a likelihood that federal commodities law preempts Nevada’s gambling rules.
Left unresolved is the broader question. Mention markets turn a speech’s wording into a tradeable asset. Whether they can survive without stricter upstream controls on who sees the text before delivery is not yet answered.
