The longtime operator of President Donald Trump’s teleprompter is under investigation by federal authorities, stemming from bets he allegedly made on the Kalshi prediction market platform regarding Trump’s statements.
The operator reportedly made more than US$90,000 in profits from these transactions, however most of this was frozen by Kalshi after bets made on the platform’s ‘Mentions’ marketplace were flagged as suspicious, according to the company.
This deal includes contracts for words or phrases that Trump will say during a planned speech, CNBC reports.
A person familiar with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) investigation into the transactions, who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified the operator as Gabriel Perez, who has operated the teleprompters for Trump’s speeches since the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Our monitoring team quickly flagged these transactions and forwarded them to the CFTC following an investigation by the exchange,” said Robert DeNault, head of regulatory enforcement at Kalshi, in a statement sent to CNBC.
“We assisted the regulators in this matter and provided them with the evidence we had collected, as we do in all referral cases,” added Mr. DeNault.
According to Kalshi, the company’s monitoring identified transactions in contracts linked to Donald Trump’s public statements that did not follow typical buying and selling patterns.
Some of these transactions had also been reported separately by market makers via so-called “alert” channels.
Kalshi surveillance analysts used data collected during customer care and follow-up procedures to discover that the account holder worked for the federal government and was a teleprompter operator, according to the company.
Kalshi then froze the account, keeping almost all of the profits.
The investigation into Mr. Perez was first reported by ABC News.
The outlet, citing sources, reported that in addition to Trump’s State of the Union address to Congress in February, “CFTC investigators found that Perez made bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a prime-time speech in December, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and remarks Trump made in March at a Medal of Honor ceremony.”
Perez’s LinkedIn page identifies him as an employee of VIP Prompting, a company said to have managed White House teleprompters since the 1960s.
Kalshi prohibits insider trading on its platforms and has taken steps throughout 2026 to combat speculators using inside information to trade on its markets.
