Washington– A U.S. Special Forces soldier involved in the military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the mission to win more than $400,000 in an online betting market, federal officials announced Thursday.
The New York federal prosecutor’s office said Gannon Ken Van Dyke was part of the operation to capture Maduro in January and used his access to classified information to make money from the prediction market site PoleMarket.
The Department of Justice charged him with illegal use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of non-public government information, merchandise fraud, wire fraud, and conducting an illegal cash transaction. He could face years in prison.
Van Dyke, 38, was involved in planning and executing Maduro’s capture for about a month starting on December 8, 2025, according to the federal prosecutor’s office. However, despite the fact that he signed non-disclosure agreements in which he pledged not to reveal “any confidential or sensitive information” related to the operations, prosecutors say the army soldier used this information to make a series of bets related to Venezuelan President Maduro being out of power by January 31, 2026.
“This concerns a US soldier who allegedly abused his position to take advantage of a fair military process,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a social media post.
The phone number listed for Van Dyke in public records was not in service. A lawyer has not yet been appointed for him.
Polymarket, one of the world’s largest prediction markets, said it had found someone trading classified government information, notified the US Department of Justice and “cooperated with its investigation.”
“Insider trading has no place at Polymarket,” the company said in a statement.
Polymarket’s forecast market website is displayed on a computer screen, on January 11, 2026, in New York.
(AP Photo/Wyatt Grantham Phillips, File)
The second complaint was filed against the soldier
The Federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, announced Thursday that it had filed a parallel complaint against Van Dyke.
That complaint alleges that Van Dyke moved $35,000 from his personal bank account to a cryptocurrency exchange account on December 26, 2025 — just over a week before U.S. forces arrived in Caracas and seized Maduro.
Van Dyke used more than $32,500 to make a series of bets on whether Maduro would be removed from power between Dec. 11, 2025, and Jan. 31, 2026, according to the complaint.
Van Dijk placed these bets between December 30 and January 2, 2026, with the vast majority of them occurring on the night of January 2 – just hours before the first missiles hit Caracas.
In the early hours of January 3, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social a photo of the now-arrested Venezuelan leader, wearing a gray tracksuit, protective headphones, and blindfolded.
The complaint said that Van Dyke’s bets on Maduro leaving power resulted in “profits of more than $404,000.” Bets on three other Venezuela-related contracts generated more than $5,000, according to the complaint.
“The defendant was entrusted with classified information about U.S. operations, yet he took actions that endangered U.S. national security and endangered the lives of U.S. service members,” Michael Selig, the committee chairman, said in a statement.
Huge profits from well-timed bets sparked public interest a few days after the raid, but Polymarket said nothing to the public at the time.
Officials allege that shortly after the operation, Van Dyke placed most of the money he won into a cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He also asked Polymarket to delete his account, saying he had lost access to his email associated with the account, according to the federal prosecutor’s office.
When asked about the case on Thursday, Trump compared the beleaguered soldier to the late professional baseball player Pete Rose, who was banned from the sport amid accusations that he placed bets on his team.
“The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat like a casino, and you look at what’s happening around the world and Europe and everywhere, they’re doing these betting things,” Trump told reporters.
The Trump administration has been a key ally of the growing prediction market industry in a crucial legal battle with countries seeking to ban the platforms. The president’s eldest son is an advisor to both Calci and Polymarket and an investor in the latter. Trump’s social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict.
Nearly two decades in the military
Van Dyke joined the Army in 2008, and in 2023, he was promoted to sergeant major, the second-highest enlisted rank in the Army, according to the indictment.
Federal prosecutors confirmed that he was a senior enlisted soldier who was part of the Special Forces community and was stationed at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, North Carolina, but the indictment provided few other details about his military service.
However, the document says that after the raid Van Dyke was photographed on the deck of a ship “wearing a US military uniform, holding a rifle, and standing alongside three other individuals wearing US military uniforms.”
The Pentagon referred questions about the case to the Army and the Department of Justice.
Army officials declined to provide Van Dyke’s service record.
Usually, the military services are reticent to provide details about special forces personnel and take measures to keep their identities secret.
Prediction markets draw scrutiny
Prediction markets allow people to bet on everything from sports to elections, and have prompted bipartisan scrutiny in Congress and calls for stricter regulations.
Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that a group of new accounts on Polymarket made highly specific and well-timed bets on whether the United States and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for these new clients. On the same day the AP published the report, the White House warned employees against using private information to trade in prediction markets.
On Wednesday, Calci Forecasting imposed fines and suspended three congressional candidates who the company said had bet on the results of their elections.
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