Two Democratic lawmakers in the US Congress have introduced legislation in response to “government corruption” over bets on prediction markets platforms.
In a Tuesday announcement, Texas Representative Greg Casar and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said they had introduced the Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions (BETS OFF) Act after several Polymarket accounts made “highly unusual bets” that a war between the US and Israel against Iran would begin.
Murphy said on March 4 that it was likely that people with “inside information” of US President Donald Trump’s plan to bomb Iran had made the bets.
“We shouldn’t live in a country where someone sitting in the situation room making decisions about whether to invade or to bomb, decisions about war and peace, life and death, that those decisions could be driven by the fact that they have hundreds of thousands of dollars riding on the decision,” said Casar.
The bill is the latest twist in US lawmakers’ efforts to crack down on prediction market platforms and accounts allegedly using insider information to profit from government actions. Last week, California Senator Adam Schiff introduced the DEATH BETS Act to prevent prediction markets platforms from listing events contracts related to war, terrorism, assassination and individual deaths.
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Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi offer bets on a variety of outcomes, including sporting events and US politics. However, users betting on the specifics of the US-Israel conflict with Iran have ignited controversy in many areas of government. On Monday, a military correspondent with the Times of Israel said that he had received death threats over his report of the date when an Iranian missile had struck Israel, all “in order to resolve a prediction on Polymarket.”
War-related bets still live on Polymarket
As of Tuesday, Polymarket still offered users the opportunity to place bets on the outcomes of several potential decisions in the US-Israel conflict against Iran, including on whether the US would send ground forces into the country, when a ceasefire might happen, and changes to Iranian leadership.
“The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society,” said Polymarket in a note on Middle East markets. “That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and [X, formerly Twitter] could not.”
Kalshi, in contrast, offered event contracts related to the Iranian conflict but not on specific military actions, such as if the country might reach a nuclear deal with the US and whether Trump or other elected officials might visit Iran.
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