A US special forces soldier involved in the military operation to capture then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the mission to win more than US$400,000 in an online betting market, federal officials said on Thursday.
Gannon Ken van Dyke was part of the operation to capture Maduro in January and used his access to classified information to make money on the prediction market site Polymarket, the federal prosecutors’ office in New York said.
He has been charged by the US Department of Justice with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud and making an unlawful monetary transaction.
Photo: AP
Van Dyke, 38, was involved in the planning and execution of capturing Maduro for about a month beginning on Dec. 8 last year, the federal prosecutors’ office said.
Even though he signed nondisclosure agreements promising to not divulge “any classified or sensitive information” related to the operations, prosecutors said that the soldier used the information to make a series of bets related to Maduro being out of power by Jan. 31.
“This involved a US soldier who allegedly took advantage of his position to profit off of a righteous military operation,” FBI Director Kash Patel said on social media.
A telephone number listed for Van Dyke in public records was not in service. There was not yet an attorney listed for him in court documents.
Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets in the world, said it had found someone trading on classified government information, alerted the justice department and “cooperated with their investigation.”
“Insider trading has no place on Polymarket,” the company said in a statement.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, on Thursday said that it had filed a parallel complaint against Van Dyke that alleges he moved US$35,000 from his personal bank account into a cryptocurrency exchange account on Dec. 26 last year — a little over a week before US forces flew into Caracas and seized Maduro.
Van Dyke used more than US$32,500 to make a series of bets on when Maduro might be removed from power, the complaint said.
He placed the bets between Dec. 30 last year and Jan. 2, with the vast majority occurring the night of Jan. 2 — just hours before the first missiles fell on Caracas.
In the early hours of Jan. 3, US President Donald Trump posted on social media a photograph of the now-captured Venezuelan leader, wearing a gray sweatsuit, headphones and a blindfold.
The bets Van Dyke made on Maduro leaving power resulted in “more than [US]$404,000 of profits,” the complaint said.
Bets on three other Venezuela-related contracts netted the solider more than US$5,000, the document said.
“The defendant was entrusted with confidential information about US operations and yet took action that endangered US national security and put the lives of American service members in harm’s way,” said Michael Selig, the commission’s chairman.
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