Teleprompter operator allegedly made Kalshi bets on Trump statements; CFTC investigating

President Donald Trump 's longtime teleprompter operator is under investigation by federal regulators in connection with bets they allegedly made on the prediction market platform Kalshi related to statements made by Trump.

The operator allegedly made more than $90,000 in profits on the trades, but most of that money was frozen by Kalshi after the bets on the platform's "Mentions " market were flagged as suspicious, according to the company. That market includes contracts on words or phrases that Trump will say during a scheduled speech.

A person familiar with the investigation of the trades by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission , who spoke on the condition of anonymity, identified the operator as Gabriel Perez, who has handled teleprompters for Trump speeches since the 2016 presidential campaign.

"Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation," said Robert DeNault, Kalshi's head of enforcement, in a statement to CNBC.

"We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected, as we do in any referral," DeNault said.

According to Kalshi, the company's surveillance in March flagged trades on contracts related to public statements by Trump that did not follow typical patterns of buying and selling.

Some of the trades were separately flagged by market makers in so-called whistleblower channels.

Kalshi's surveillance analysts used data collected during the onboarding of customers and monitoring procedures to discover that the account holder worked for the federal government and a teleprompter operator, according to the company.

Kalshi then froze the account, retaining almost all of the profits.

The media outlet, citing sources, reported that in addition to Trump's State of the Union address to Congress in February "CFTC investigators discovered that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump's remarks in March during a Medal of Honor ceremony."

Perez's LinkedIn page identifies him as an employee of VIP Prompting, a company that reportedly has operated White House teleprompters since the 1960s.

A person who answered the phone at VIP Prompting on Thursday declined to comment.

Kalshi bans insider trading on its platforms, and has taken steps throughout 2026 to crack down on speculators using material, nonpublic information to trade on its markets.

The company recently instituted new requirements for traders in certain markets to submit details on their employment status. Those changes were announced in June, and Perez's trades were allegedly caught in March.

The CFTC's investigation of Perez comes on the heels of two major insider trading cases involving prediction market platforms.

In April, a U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant was arrested on federal criminal charges in a case where prosecutors alleged he made hugely profitable trades on event contracts on the Polymarket platform related to the American military mission to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

The sergeant, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, allegedly was involved in the planning and execution of that successful raid. Van Dyke is being sued in a civil complaint by the CFTC for his alleged conduct.