Kalshi bans George Santos for life, imposes $71,356 penalty

CFTC alleged Santos earned over $17,000 from SOTU attendance bets

Prediction-market operator Kalshi permanently banned former Rep. George Santos from its platform Monday and imposed a $71,356 penalty, the company’s first lifetime suspension, according to a Kalshi spokeswoman. The penalty, posted on Kalshi’s website, exceeds the amount the CFTC alleged Santos earned from the trades.

Kalshi said the lifetime ban was issued because Santos did not fully cooperate with the company’s investigation. Santos can appeal the decision to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The CFTC alleged in February 2026 that Santos made a series of misleading statements on social media about whether he would attend Trump’s State of the Union speech while placing lucrative bets on Kalshi on the same question. When severe weather threatened his travel plans to Washington, Santos purchased contracts saying he would not attend, the regulator said. He then sold those contracts for a profit after multiple misleading posts suggesting he would be present, the CFTC alleged.

The CFTC characterized the conduct as improperly trading on an event Santos had the power to influence. In July, Santos agreed to pay more than $35,000 to settle the agency’s claims. His attorney, Joseph Murray, said at the time that the payment was made to avoid “lengthy and costly litigation” and “should not be mistaken for admission of any wrongdoing.” Murray did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday’s lifetime ban.

The CFTC banned Santos from trading on all platforms for three years; the agency noted in its settlement report that Santos cooperated with the CFTC’s investigation.

Santos was expelled from the House in 2023 and pleaded guilty in 2024 to federal charges of wire fraud and identity theft. A federal judge sentenced him to just over seven years in prison. President Trump commuted his sentence last year.

The lifetime ban comes amid other federal enforcement actions targeting prediction-market users. On Friday, the CFTC announced a settlement with Gabriel Perez, a White House teleprompter operator under investigation for placing bets using proprietary information. Perez agreed to pay a $65,000 civil penalty and surrender more than $107,000 in winnings. Kalshi suspended Perez from its platform for three years; the CFTC banned him from participating in trading markets for the same period.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that federal authorities are preparing charges against a U.S. servicemember suspected of placing Polymarket bets on military operations that earned him more than $1 million. Authorities are also pursuing a case involving an employee at accounting and consulting firm KPMG, according to people familiar with that investigation. The employee is under investigation for betting on whether a specific public company would beat the consensus estimate for quarterly earnings, one of the people said.