The Kalshi George Santos ban arrived alongside a parallel settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), resolving what regulators classified as manipulative trading on a prediction market contract tied to Santos’s own attendance at the 2026 State of the Union address.
Kalshi permanently suspended Santos and fined him $71,356 via its internal compliance process. Separately, according to the CFTC’s enforcement order, Santos agreed to disgorge approximately $17,569 in trading profits and pay an additional $17,500 civil monetary penalty, bringing his total federal settlement to approximately $35,000.
Santos created his Kalshi account on 11 February 2026 with an initial deposit of $1,000, then made further deposits totalling approximately $6,000 between 14 and 22 February, trading exclusively on the contract covering whether he would attend the address scheduled for 24 February. According to Wired, after placing those trades he began making public statements about his attendance in an attempt to move the contract’s price, some of which Kalshi’s disciplinary notice described as ‘false or misleading.’ Kalshi flagged the activity, froze his account, and referred the matter to the CFTC.
Santos’s lawyer said he settled to put the matter behind him. Santos himself called Kalshi an ‘unserious company’ in a post on X.
Kalshi George Santos Ban and the Buckhout Suspension
The Santos action was not Kalshi’s only enforcement this cycle. The platform also handed a three-year trading suspension to Laurie Buckhout, the Republican candidate in North Carolina’s 1st congressional district, with her suspension starting 28 August 2026, according to USA Today.
Buckhout’s penalty came to $2,589.96, per The Assembly NC, on bets totalling less than $1,000, after she placed trades on a contract covering the outcome of her own race. Kalshi’s compliance team noted she cooperated with the inquiry. Buckhout reportedly called the episode a ‘dumb mistake.’ She remains on the ballot and, as of Tuesday, Kalshi’s market gave Democratic incumbent Don Davis a 63% probability of winning versus Buckhout’s 41%.
This is Buckhout’s second consecutive run against Davis in the district, according to the Raleigh News and Observer.
Kalshi’s rulebook is unambiguous on the conflict: if a trader has any influence, directly or indirectly, on the outcome of a contract’s underlying event, trading that contract is prohibited regardless of the scale of that influence.
Wider Enforcement Pressure on Prediction Markets
These cases sit inside a broader pattern. Earlier this year, federal regulators fined Gabriel Perez, President Trump’s teleprompter operator, $172,000 in total after he traded Kalshi contracts tied to Trump’s speeches. According to NPR, that figure comprised more than $100,000 in disgorgement of profits plus a $65,000 civil fine, with regulators noting specific mitigating and aggravating factors in arriving at the penalty.
The CFTC classified the Kalshi State of the Union contract as a swap under the Commodity Exchange Act, an expansive read that underpins the agency’s claim to exclusive jurisdiction over these markets. CFTC chair Michael Selig has vowed to take legal action against any state authority that challenges that position, and the agency has already invoked emergency authority to oppose New York’s attempt to bar Kalshi from offering election and sports contracts.
The scale of what is at stake for the platforms is considerable. Kalshi and Polymarket together facilitated an estimated $44 billion in contracts in 2025, per the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Kalshi alone reported weekly trading volumes exceeding $1 billion by late 2025, across more than 3,500 markets, with sports contracts accounting for roughly 75% to 90% of that volume.
That sports-heavy mix is precisely what state regulators are using to argue these platforms require gaming licences rather than CFTC oversight. A Nevada federal court initially sided with Kalshi, then reversed, finding that its sports parlay-style markets resemble sportsbook products rather than swaps, according to Ars Technica.
Buckhout’s race against Davis and any remaining markets tied to Santos-adjacent events are the live tests of how Kalshi enforces its own rules while fighting to defend its regulatory perimeter. The CFTC’s next move in the state litigation, likely before year-end, will set the jurisdictional frame for every enforcement action that follows.
