Mystery bettor made huge windfall gambling on Maduro’s fall hours before it happened

More than half of the value of the total bets the trader made against the Venezuelan president came from wagers made in the hours before the U.S. attack on Caracas

Someone bet big on the downfall of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro just hours before the head of state was seized by U.S. forces in Caracas.

The unknown bettor had already placed a wager against Maduro remaining as Venezuela's leader, and doubled down less than five hours before the U.S. hit the Venezuelan capital with rockets, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The gambler's wages on Polymarket, a crypto-based betting platform, earned them more than $400,000, 12 times what they invested. The prescient bet has led to some speculation that someone with foreknowledge of the operation made a tidy profit from insider information.

On the stock market, insider trading is illegal. Regulators are tasked with monitoring for individuals with insider information using their knowledge to game the markets, but those same safeguards do not exist on crypto-based betting platforms like Polymarket.

Prediction markets like Polymarket allow users to bet on any number of upcoming events, ranging from presidential elections to which characters would die in the series finale of Stranger Things.

An unknown gambler made more than $400,000 betting on the downfall of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in the hours before the U.S. attack on Caracas (Reuters)

The unknown bettor reportedly created their account in December and placed their bet against Maduro on December 27. That bet was $96 worth of contracts predicting that the U.S. would invade Venezuela by January 31, according to Polymarket's data. The bettor continued wagering on the invasion over the following week, focusing primarily on bets that Maduro would not be leading Venezuela by January 31.

The trader made their last bet around 9:58 pm on Friday, just hours before President Donald Trump ordered the military to attack Caracas and take Maduro into custody. Contracts on Polymarket predicting that Maduro would no longer be in power were only priced at 8 centers per contract, meaning that the site's users only saw an 8 percent probability of it happening by the end of the month.

Those contract prices spiked after news broke of the U.S. military operation in Venezuela.

Overall, the bettor made $34,000 worth of wagers and made $410,000 in profit. More than half the value of the total wagers made occurred the night just before the attack.

Tre Upshaw, founder of Polysights, a company that provides analytics tools for Polymarket traders, told the Wall Street Journal that "more likely than not that this was an insider."

If the trader was a U.S. official who abused their knowledge of the operation to profit off the betting market, they could face prosecution. If the bettor is a foreign individual with knowledge of the operation, there may not be options for holding them accountable, the paper reports.

In the wake of the news about the Maduro bets, Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres said he will introduce legislation barring federal elected officials, political appointees, and employees in the executive branch from placing bets on prediction markets where they might have non-public knowledge of upcoming events.

The Independent has requested comment from Polymarket.