There were all kinds of ways you could have bet on UConn’s Elite Eight victory over Duke Sunday.

You could have gambled the traditional way, and if you took UConn and 5.5 points, you’d be a winner. You could also have bet on how many combined points Duke’s Boozer brothers would score. If you were gambling on one of the prediction markets, you could have even bought and sold your bets like stocks, essentially switching sides back and forth right up to Braylon Mullins’ game-winning three-pointer. Well, maybe not that close to the final buzzer, but close.

People who care about sports worry about the ways micro-betting and live betting are creating new ways for corruption to seep into games. Several states are considering legislation to address this problem, and there are rumblings that Congress might take action, although the phrase “don’t bet on it” could not be more appropriate.

But there is more to worry about than basketball.

On prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, you can place bets on just about anything, from who’ll win an Oscar to whether the price of oil will rise or fall. More than $6,000 has already been wagered on Kalshi on whether Atlanta or Chicago will host the 2028 Democratic National Convention. You can even place a bet on when a war will break out.

The New York Times found that on the day before the United States and Israel launched their joint attack on Iran, more than 150 Polymarket accounts placed bets totaling $855,000 that war would begin the next day. That was an enormous spike in the betting which went on in the buildup to the attack, suggesting that people with access to classified information cashed in.

In February, two Israelis, a reservist and a civilian, were charged with using classified information to place bets on Polymarket. And in January, someone predicted the fall of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and made some $400,000. These also look like cases in which money was made off classified information.

But let’s return to basketball for a moment. The easiest places for corruption to gain a footing are not on the elite teams or in the big tournaments, but farther from the spotlight, in games where money can still be made from a missed shot that blows the spread.
What happens if those with access to sensitive information decide to juice their bets by acting on what they know in some way, in no glaringly obvious way, like the point guard in a midseason game who picks up a little spending money with a missed shot? Has something like that already happened? We have little way of knowing.

There’s another, more subtle but even scarier problem with prediction markets, and that is that we are in danger of believing what we bet on. CNN and CNBC now incorporate data from Kalshi in their reporting, and Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal has a similar arrangement with Polymarket. Some journalists have reported being offered sponsorships by prediction market companies in exchange for articles that make use of their data.

At a when the lines around truth grow increasingly blurry, this is troubling. It’s one thing to report that the betting on Kalshi and Polymarket currently favors Democrats to win the congressional majority this year, although Democrats should be wary of believing this. But when this data is reported as a daily element of the news report, it takes on a mantle of credibility which no collection of online gamblers really deserves.

Promoters of prediction markets point out that they have proven to be a more accurate predictor of trends than traditional polling or surveys. This may be true, but it raises a host of questions about the biases that determine expectations, and the danger of corruption that money brings with it. In the wrong hands, systems that are better at predicting the future could also be capable of shaping a future we didn’t ask for.

The post Odds are, money’s being made from classified information appeared first on SaportaReport.