Skip to contentPhysical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
You cannot legally place money on the fate of Luigi Mangione in the United States. Kalshi, one of the only legal forecast markets, pulled all bets related to the UnitedHealthcare hit in mid-December, citing concerns from federal regulators.
From sports betting to Counter-Strike skins, gaming is having a “moment” in America. Players who want to bet on something more than the outcome of a football game use prediction markets, sites where they can bet on the outcome of events with binary outcomes. Sites like Polymarket, PredicIt, and Kalshi exploded in popularity over the past year.
Popular bets on the trend of the site with the news. During the last months of the election, gamblers made huge bets on Trump, Kamala and the future of Western liberal democracy. After Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of Manhattan, his fate became the subject of fascination in the prediction market.
Unless those markets are checked by US regulators. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has oversight of forecast markets such as Kalshi and PredictIt. On December 13, all bets related to Magione disappeared from the sites. According to BloombergKalshi removed Mangione-related bets from its sites after receiving a “notice from … regulators.” The outlet writes that the CFTC “will ban futures trading related to crimes including murder, terrorism and war if the agency decides that so-called event contracts are against the public interest.”
On Polymarket, all bets related to killers are activated. “Will Luigi Mangione fire his lawyer before 2025? Polymarket has the chances only 1 percent. “Will it be confirmed that Luigi Mangione used psychedelics?” The users gives a 43 percent chance. “Luigi Mangione motivated by dismissed charges?” On December 10, Polymarket had this at a 75 percent chance, but it is it fell to about 25 percent.
None of the Mangione-related bets are high volume. At over $400,000, “Is Luigi Mangione’s YouTube channel real?” carried the most volume. But the viral YouTube channel has been around for a long time denied as false. The question about his motivations is at $183k, but every other market has failed to exceed $100k. The prediction markets take a percentage of the bets and it is likely that Kalshi and PredictIt are not missing much money by losing killer bets.
On Polymarket, big political questions and sports bets move a lot more money. The fate of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is worth a million $the German parliamentary election is worth $4 millionand a possible Biden pardon of Sam Bankman-Fried is worth it almost $3 million. In Kalshi, people passed nearly $7 million predicting which song will top the US pop charts on Spotify. Mangione is not only a hot market.
The CFTC’s move to remove Mangione bets from Kalshi is the latest in its ongoing fight against prediction sites. It has tried, several times, to regulate the types of bets that people could place on websites like Kalshi and PredictIt. At the beginning of this year, it is tried to stop sites that allow people to bet on elections, sports, and ceremonial events such as the Oscars. But a US appeals court announced the sentence in October, just in time for the election.
On Polymarket, bets flow freely, but the management does not go well with the regulators. In November, the FBI ruined the New York apartment of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan.
