Kalshi Banned George Santos for Life and Fined Him $71,356 — Four Times What He Won

The prediction market Kalshi has permanently banned former Rep. George Santos and fined him $71,356, the first lifetime ban the company has issued to any trader on its platform. The penalty is roughly four times the $17,839.57 Kalshi says Santos made on the trades that triggered its investigation.

The trades concerned a question Santos was uniquely positioned to answer: whether he would show up at President Donald Trump's State of the Union address in February. Santos told his followers on X that he planned to attend. He did not attend. Kalshi's compliance department concluded that he "made these statements with the intent to manipulate the price" of the contracts he intended to buy, and that the statements did in fact move the price.

Kalshi said the lifetime ban, rather than a suspension, followed Santos's refusal to cooperate with the compliance review. The company had already established what it called reasonable cause to believe he traded on non-public information — in this case, information that existed only inside his own head. Kalshi has suspended other users for trading on non-public information, including a round of suspensions in February, and has fined sitting politicians who bet on their own races, but it had never before removed someone permanently.

The ban lands weeks after Santos settled a separate federal case over the same trades. Late last month he agreed to pay $35,000 to close a Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigation, which found he had made "material misrepresentations and omissions" on social media while holding positions tied to his own attendance. The combined cost to Santos now exceeds $106,000 for a set of trades that netted him less than $18,000.

Santos was dismissive. "Thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform," he wrote on X. "Let's see how much longer you guys are around for." The jab is not idle: Kalshi is fighting on several fronts at once. A federal appeals court ruled last week that its sports contracts function as bets regardless of how the company labels them, New York sued the platform in August seeking triple its revenue, and Arizona has filed criminal charges accusing it of running illegal gambling.

Santos was expelled from the House in December 2023 after a fabricated resume and a federal fraud indictment collapsed his political career. He pleaded guilty in 2024 to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft and was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He served roughly three months before Trump commuted the sentence, and he has spent the months since building an online presence — including, until this week, on a market where users could wager on what he would do next.