Will 'Sinners' win at Oscars? When will Maduro fall? Place your bets.

Hours before U.S. Army Delta Force operators captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife on Jan. 3, an anonymous trader wagered more than $30,000 on the prediction site Polymarket that Maduro would be removed from office by Jan. 31.

The bettor reportedly walked away with more than $400,000 in winnings.

The wacky and wildly popular prediction market, which involves betting on almost anything in politics, business and entertainment, takes the prospects of "Wanna bet?" to a whole new level.

Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that advocates for regulating prediction markets, told USA TODAY the bet on Maduro's capture illustrates the dangerous territory the country has now entered.

Kelleher believes the bet on Maduro being caught had all the makings of insider trading, given how few people knew about the operation.

"If that isn't the perfect scenario, then I don't know what is," Kelleher said. "It makes you ask and say to yourself, 'Gee, I wonder who it was?'"

With rival platforms Polymarket and Kalshi leading the movement, people can bet on when Russia’s war on Ukraine will end. And how many times President Donald Trump would utter the words “fake news” in the State of the Union address (zero, it turned out). Or which Trump administration member would be the first to be fired in 2026? Or whether the United States would strike Iran by March 1 (it did).

Bets placed on the removal (and eventual death) ofIran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have drawn further scrutiny on prediction markets, prompting outrage from some U.S. lawmakers to stop wagers on military actions that could aid officials with inside knowledge.

More than $500 million was reportedly placed on ​a series of wagers tied to the timing of attacks, and about $150 million was wagered on the removal of Khamenei as Supreme Leader on Polymarket alone.

California Congressman Mike Levin, a Democrat, on Feb. 28 said on the social media platform X that he flagged "a roughly $87,000" Polymarket bet from an account named "Magamyman" placed shortly before the Iran strikes that won $515,000.

"Prediction markets cannot be a vehicle for profiting off advance knowledge of military action," Levin said. "We need answers, transparency, and oversight."

An offshoot of the gambling universe once considered fringe, prediction markets allow people to wager on a vast array of upcoming and possible future events, including how many Oscars the movie "Sinners" will win, or what day an arrest will be made in the suspected abduction of Savannah Guthrie’s mother. Prediction market betting has stepped into the mass-market limelight, garnering billions of dollars and raising concerns among experts over whether it's too accessible and lacks regulation − and how it could affect people with addictive behaviors.

How do prediction markets work?

When someone buys or sells in a prediction market, it's on a "yes" or "no" wager. The entry point fluctuates between $0 and $1, reflecting what traders are willing to pay on a 0% to 100% chance they predict an event will occur.

The more likely traders think an event will occur, the more expensive it is to bet on the event. There's a lively debate over whether such bets amount to illegal gambling.

"The law is crystal clear that these activities are illegal and prohibited, period, full stop,” said Better Markets' Kelleher.

But the prediction markets also provide unique insights for users to learn something meaningful, said Eric Zitzewitz, an economics professor at Dartmouth College who has extensively researched the subject.

"I think it’s great to have lots of people's opinions on subjects aggregated in a marketplace that’s easy to interpret. And I think that’s the really compelling thing prediction markets do," Zitzewitz said.

A Sacred Heart University survey in 2025, however, noted that more than 60% of Americans are concerned about the rising ubiquity of sports betting, which accounts for the vast majority of transactions on Polymarket and Kalshi.

An American Gaming Association poll found that more than 57% of American adults engaged in gambling in some form or another within the past year. The poll also determined that more than three-quarters of Americans believe the gaming industry helps the nation's overall economy. Meanwhile, the American Psychiatric Association said last year that about 28% of Americans gamble online daily.

Kelleher contends that betting on politics and world events may violate the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, citing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) provision, which specifies that the agency overseeing the markets prohibits trades on "terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law." 

In the meantime, more companies are seeking a cut of the predictions game.

DraftKings, one of the biggest online sportsbooks, announced in January that it now has a prediction market service. Crypto platforms Robinhood and Coinbase also have joined the fray.

Who wants a piece of the prediction markets action?

As the markets heat up, the courts have begun laying the groundwork to tackle some of the more prickly questions.

The 2018 Supreme Court ruling striking down the federal ban on sports betting paved the way for widespread legalization: 38 states and the District of Columbia now offer sports betting at casinos, near stadiums, and on popular websites and mobile apps.

Initially, the four major professional sports leagues and the NCAA opposed such betting. Officials and executives worried that the integrity of their sports would be compromised. Over time, the leagues came to embrace wagering and even partnered with DraftKings and FanDuel, effectively landing a piece of the action.

And now the door is opening to prediction markets.

The Trump administration has embraced prediction markets despite the widespread criticism. The companies at the forefront of the industry include Polymarket, which was forced to cease operations in the United States in 2022. The home of the company's CEO, Shayne Coplan, was raided by the FBI in 2024, but it did not lead to federal criminal charges.

Easy access to such betting bothers Democratic New York congressman Ritchie Torres, who introduced federal legislation last month to prohibit elected officials and staff from trading on prediction markets using nonpublic, policy-related information.

The bill aims to prevent insider trading on platforms such as Polymarket and make sure officials can't influence government actions for their own personal financial gain. Torres' proposed legislation came in response to reports of potential insider trading on Polymarket involving the U.S. military's capture of Maduro in January.

Then there are the legal spats cropping up across the country. Polymarket filed a preemptive lawsuit earlier in February against Massachusetts, which just won a preliminary injunction against competitor Kalshi in state Superior Court. The injunction specifically applies to the prediction markets' "event contracts," or wagers, which Massachusetts argued should be regulated as a sportsbook in the state.

Nevada, the pinnacle of casino gambling, has sued Kalshi for offering event contracts that would allow its residents to bet on sports. Nevada judges have already barred Polymarket and Coinbase from offering event contracts.

Nevada sued on Feb. 17, and that same day, Mike Selig, chairman of the CFTC, the agency overseeing prediction markets, filed a "friend of the court" brief before the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stating that all prediction market betting fell exclusively under his agency’s jurisdiction.

Selig wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed and posted a related video on social media further stating his stance that the CFTC has the regulatory authority on prediction markets.

"To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear: We will see you in court," Selig said in the video.

Utah prohibits most forms of gambling, but prediction markets have created a loophole for Utah residents since March 2025.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, responded to Selig's comments with his own social media post.

"I don’t remember the CFTC having authority over the ‘derivative market’ of LeBron James rebounds," Cox wrote on X. "These prediction markets you are breathlessly defending are gambling – pure and simple.

"Let me be clear," Cox wrote. "I will use every resource within my disposal as governor of the sovereign state of Utah, and under the Constitution of the United States to beat you in court."

Meanwhile, the Coalition for Prediction Markets, an advocacy group, agrees with Selig's position and believes the CFTC is "best equipped to ensure market integrity.""A patchwork of state regimes would create uneven protections for consumers and incentives to move more activity offshore, undermining customer safeguards," the coalition said in an emailed statement to USA TODAY.

On Feb. 25, the CFTC announced it fined two people for improper trading on Kalshi. The first case involved a California gubernatorial candidate who was fined more than $2,200 for trading on his own election candidacy. Another man was fined more than $20,000 for using nonpublic information related to YouTube personality MrBeast.  

Selig recently announced the CFTC would create an "Innovation Advisory Committee" to help draft regulations to address concerns about cryptocurrencies and prediction markets. The 35-member panel includes the CEOs of Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase, Robinhood, FanDuel and DraftKings. Although the advisory panel has some representation from traditional finance, it does not include consumer advocates or public interest groups.

On Feb. 13, 23 Democratic senators sent a letter to Selig urging the CFTC to "abstain from intervening" on pending court cases over the legality of offerings on the prediction market platforms tied to "sports, war, and other prohibited events."

"Prediction market platforms are offering contracts that mirror sportsbook wagers and, in some cases, contracts tied to war and armed conflict," the lawmakers wrote. "These products evade state and tribal consumer protections, generate no public revenue, and undermine sovereign regulatory regimes."

Ten days later, six Democratic senators sent another letter to Selig asking him to clarify his position on prediction markets. They wrote that their concerns included predictions that "incentivize physical injury or death."  

Their letter specifically mentions that Polymarket users have been allowed to bet on subjects including whether the Artemis 2 spaceship would explode, when Maduro would be removed from power and when Russian forces would overtake the Ukrainian city of Myrnohad. 

"These recent events highlight the lack of internal controls and safeguards to prevent insiders from profiting off of non-public information, and direct profiteering off of human suffering," the lawmakers' letter said.

The CFTC did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment about the letters.

A year ago, most people hadn’t even heard of these companies or even knew what a prediction market was, said Danny Funt, a sports journalist and author of the book "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling."

"It’s clearly feeding into this insatiable appetite for gambling in so many ways. There are the frivolous bets, which make you wonder what value those have, and then you have the provocative," Funt said. "It's like betting on two flies − which fly will climb up the highest on a wall faster?

"It's really harmful that it's not being described as gambling."

Betting on all manner of political outcomes is not new

Wagering on nonsporting events such as the U.S. presidential election is nothing new. Betting on candidates was common in the early 20th century, said Erik Snowberg, an economics and political science professor at the University of Utah. Snowberg added that in New York City, betting commissioners controlled the activities at a site known as the New York Curb Exchange.

“The odds were published in the newspapers,” Snowberg told USA TODAY.

Prediction markets have existed in many variations since the beginning of the 21st century, said Snowberg and Zitzewitz, who have written and collaborated extensively on the subject. 

But the 2024 presidential election is widely considered the first time billions of dollars were bet on the day-to-day events of American politics, both say. 

Betting on whether Donald Trump would regain the presidency reportedly skyrocketed on Polymarket and Kalshi during the frenetic last weeks of the campaign. The odds on those platforms, more so than the popular and preferred polls, some experts claim, provided some indication of a Trump victory. 

Though some people turn to prediction markets to place bets, others have begun using them as sources of information about the state of the world, to catch up on the news, or to monitor the stock market, Zitzewitz said. 

“I’m a little more agnostic that sports predictive markets are a good idea rather than markets on where we’re actually learning something and really meaningful, elections, policies, outcomes, climate change, you know, serious topics like that.”

Political players grab a front-row seat

Politics is also in play in the upper ranks of these betting companies.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, is a Polymarket investor and advisory board member, and a strategic adviser to Kalshi. Trump Jr. said both Polymarket and Kalshi nailed his father’s presidential victory, unlike traditional media and polls.

“Hmmm, that just seems, awfully, awfully convenient, doesn’t it?” Justin Wolfers, a public policy and economics professor at the University of Michigan who has written prediction market reports with Snowberg and Zitzewitz, told USA TODAY. “Yeah, having one of the president’s sons on those boards seems like a conflict of interest, no?"

Then there’s Truth Social, President Trump’s publicly traded social media network, which has more than 11 million users, announcing the launch of its own prediction market service, Truth Predict, that will offer trading on elections, the economy, interest rates, sports and more. 

"We’re democratizing information and empowering everyday Americans to harness the wisdom of the crowd, turning free speech into actionable foresight," Devin Nunes, chairman and CEO of Trump Media, said in a statement in October 2025.

The deal is in partnership with Crypto.com, which is registered with the CFTC. After the Truth Predict announcement, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said that "prediction markets are poised to be a multi-deca-billion-dollar industry."

The question is striking a nerve with Sen. John Boozman, R-Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC. Boozman compares the prediction markets to the Wild West and said he intends to talk with Selig about it.

"This is an area that just caught fire; I don’t think anybody expected it to grow at the rate that it has," Boozman told news outlet Semafor. "But there is concern. It’s the Wild West. There’s not much regulation.

"Probably at some point, either from a regulatory standpoint or Congress stepping in and passing some sort of law, it does need to be cleaned up."

Under the Biden administration, the CFTC banned Kalshi from allowing people to bet on which party would win control of the House and the Senate. The CFTC had argued that commodifying elections is "contrary to the public interest" and could invite bad actors to try to manipulate election outcomes.

Kalshi filed a lawsuit challenging the regulation, however, and won as a three-judge federal appeals panel ruled that the regulators failed to show the harm the public would face.

The Biden administration appealed the decision, but the Trump administration dropped the matter. Effectively, bettors can now make multimillion-dollar wagers. Events like the Super Bowl and the upcoming November midterm elections are now in play on platforms and apps.

Funt, the journalist who wrote a book on the new type of betting, said the prediction markets are becoming "normalized," noting that cable networks CNN and CNBC have reportedly entered deals with Kalshi, and Polymarket has similar deals with Yahoo Finance and Dow Jones.

Also, Funt believes the CFTC, which has about 700 employees, has become a smaller and more preferred agency by prediction market industry leaders to oversee them, compared with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has about 5,000 employees.

In December, the Office of the Inspector General reported that the CFTC had a 21.5% decrease in full-time employees since the end of fiscal year 2024. 

"They don’t even have the staff or the budget to protect and regulate properly the markets that they are supposed to regulate and protect the American people," Kelleher said. "The CFTC is the smallest, least-capable financial regulator in the United States, which has been chronically underfunded for decades. It has very little ability right now to do the job it's supposed to do." 

Funt considers federal oversight for the industry lax. "It's not that we'll put the genie back in the bottle, and they will eventually realize that it got out of hand, created a public health crisis, and try to rein things in."

Lucrative wagers on war

The politics of war also are playing out on the prediction markets.

For most people, Maduro's capture seemed to come out of the blue. The odds that he would be captured were only 6.5% on Polymarket midday on Jan. 2, but the odds spiked to to 11% just before midnight and surged.

The newly created Polymarket account that wagered on Maduro's capture made a 1,200% return in less than 24 hours on a military operation, said prediction market expert Adam Goldenberg, a fellow at Rutgers University. He believes that now Ukrainian volunteers, Russian military bloggers and American security clearance holders could convert their insider knowledge of military operations into profit through pseudonymous crypto wallets.

"But there's an even deeper psychological problem with these markets. They create, you know, an empathy inversion," Goldenberg said. "If someone has placed a bet that a strike will happen, they now have (a) financial reason to hope for violence, even if they never consciously admit it. There's a part of their brain that's rooting for people to die so they can profit."

And Goldenberg said that mentality is the opposite of how we should relate to war.

"The normal human response is to prefer peace, to hope conflicts do not escalate, to want fewer casualties," Goldenberg said. "But at the end of the day, we're still betting on violence, and we're still treating human suffering as a tradable commodity.

"And that should worry all of us."