Feds Crack Down on Luigi Mangione Bets on Gambling Sites

You can’t legally put money on the fate of Luigi Mangione in the United States. Kalshi, one of the only legal prediction markets, pulled all bets related to the UnitedHealthcare assassin in the middle of December, citing problems from federal regulators.

From sports betting to Counter-Strike skins, gambling is having a “moment” in America. Gamblers who want to bet on something besides the outcome of a football game are using 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 site trend along with the news. During the last few months of the election, gamblers made huge bets on Trump, Kamala, and the future of liberal Western democracy. After Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the streets of Manhattan, his fate became the prediction market’s object of fascination.

Unless those markets are checked by U.S. regulators. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has oversight on prediction markets like Kalshi and PredictIt. On December 13, all wagers related to Magione vanished from the sites. According to Bloomberg, Kalshi removed the Mangione-related wagers from its sites after it received a “notice from…regulators.” The outlet writes that the CFTC “bans futures trading linked to crimes including assassination, terrorism, and war if the agency decides the so-called events contracts are against the public interest.”

On Polymarket all assassin-related bets are on. “Will Luigi Mangione fire his lawyer before 2025?” Polymarket has the odds at just 1 percent. “Will it be confirmed that Luigi Mangione used psychedelics?” The users give it a 43 percent chance. “Luigi Mangione motivated by denied claims?” On December 10, Polymarket had this at a 75 percent chance, but it plummeted to around 25 percent.

None of the Mangione-related bets are high volume. At over $400,000, “Is Luigi Mangione YouTube channel real?” carried the most volume. But the viral YouTube channel has long since been debunked as fake. The question about his motivations is at $183k, but every other market has failed to get above $100k. The prediction markets take a percentage of the bets and it’s likely that Kalshi and PredictIt aren’t missing a lot of cash by losing assassin-related bets.

On Polymarket, big political questions and sports bets are moving a lot more cash. The fate of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is worth $1 million, the German parliamentary election is worth $4 million, and a possible Biden pardon of Sam Bankman-Fried is worth almost $3 million. On Kalshi, people have spent almost $7 million predicting which song will top the USA pop charts on Spotify. Mangione just isn’t a hot market.

The CFTC’s move to remove Mangione-related bets from Kalshi is the latest in its ongoing fight against prediction sites. It’s tried, several times, to regulate what kinds of wagers people could place on websites like Kalshi and PredictIt. Earlier this year, it tried to stop the sites from allowing people to bet on elections, sporting, and ceremonial events like the Oscars. But a U.S. court of appeals overturned the ruling in October, just in time for the election.

On Polymarket the bets flow freely, but the leadership isn’t faring as well with regulators. In November, the FBI raided the NYC apartment of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan.