On prediction markets, you can win money by forecasting the future: Who will be elected president in 2028? Which team will win the World Cup?
You can also now make money by predicting the past: Who will win the 50th season of “Survivor,” which is currently airing but was filmed last year?
Kalshi and Polymarket, the two largest prediction markets, are offering bets on reality television shows, including “Survivor,” “The Bachelorette” and “Top Chef,” which are usually taped months before they are broadcast. That means the people who know the outcomes — like contestants and production staff — could make surefire bets before the episodes air and win thousands of dollars.
Those bets can also essentially reveal the outcome to the rest of the world (but we won’t spoil any upcoming episodes here).
There’s no proof that anyone associated with “Survivor” is placing trades. But enough bets are being placed to move the markets in very clear directions. Ahead of last week’s episode of “Survivor,” a Kalshi market gave one contestant, “Q” Burdette, 98 percent odds of being voted off the island in that episode. There were 21 players left, any of whom could have gone home, but Burdette was indeed the one eliminated.
The Kalshi market for tonight’s episode of “Survivor” also has one contestant with a 98 percent chance of elimination.
The “Survivor” winner will be revealed on live TV at the end of the season, based on fellow players’ votes that have already been cast. Bettors seem to have a good idea of who it is: One of the 20 remaining contestants is listed as an 86 percent favorite on Kalshi, in a market with a total trade volume of $9.5 million.
Liz Wilcox, who played “Survivor” in a 2024 season, said her fellow contestants were “incredibly serious” about preventing spoilers. “In fact, one of the players threatened to sue the other players if there was a leak,” she said. But other seasons have been spoiled — and now there is a market-driven financial incentive to do it.
Tribal council: Is this legal?
The 24 players on this season of “Survivor” would have signed nondisclosure agreements, along with their immediate family members. The number of production members who would know the order of eliminations would be in the hundreds.
We interviewed law professors and practicing lawyers, who all agreed that a contestant or crew member who signed such an agreement and traded on the prediction markets could be committing fraud. The outcome can be viewed, legally, as the property of the show. Insiders betting on it are misappropriating that property for their own benefit.
But the details are complex. Jaimie Nawaday, a former federal prosecutor who works in white-collar defense, says prediction markets create many distinct scenarios for trades involving the misappropriation of private information.
“I would say the range of fact patterns that we have in prediction markets is essentially limitless,” she said. “There’s always gray area in traditional insider trading, but the range of fact patterns is more limited.”
In an attempt to clarify those gray areas, we created our own legal “tribal council.” We wanted to know, under various hypothetical circumstances, would a trade on a prediction market be legal or not? We posed the following scenarios to three white-collar lawyers.
Who would enforce this?
Kalshi has fined people for insider trading on its platform, including an editor for the YouTuber MrBeast who was placing bets on the outcome of challenges in his coming videos.
But no one has been legally charged for insider trading on prediction markets, lawyers said.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency known for investigating insider trading, does not have jurisdiction over prediction markets because their event contracts are technically commodities, not securities.
But the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission and federal prosecutors do have the ability to pursue cases against people who trade with inside information. Broad statutes like wire fraud could be used.
Sean Shecter, also a former federal prosecutor who now works in white-collar defense, said trading on nonpublic material information could be prosecutable whether it was done on a stock exchange or prediction market.
“If I was a regulator, I would be like, let’s just keep it simple: If you’re trading on inside information that is material, then that’s in violation of the law,” he said. “I don’t care how pretty it looks, how unique it is. We’ll go back to basics.”
On a practical level, thoroughly investigating cases could be an issue. Compared with the S.E.C., “the C.F.T.C is a much lesser financed agency, much smaller budget, much smaller staff,” said John C. Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School who has written about prediction markets. The agency, he said, “probably cannot enforce everything that might occur on the prediction markets.”
And even if the C.F.T.C. has the legal ability and resources to police insider trading on prediction markets, it’s not clear how aggressive it will be. The Trump administration has supported looser regulation of prediction markets. Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket and a paid adviser to Kalshi.
Amy Fan and Josh Katz contributed reporting. Sean Catangui contributed production.
Ben Blatt is a reporter for The Upshot specializing in data-driven journalism.
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