Ex-White House teleprompter operator ordered to pay $172K for insider betting scheme

Gabriel Perez had a job that gave him something most people don't have: advance sight of what the President would say. As a teleprompter operator in the White House, he saw Trump's speeches before they were delivered to the nation. Between December 2025 and February 2026, he used that access to place bets on prediction markets, wagering on specific words and phrases that would appear in those speeches. He made $107,500 doing it.

On Friday, federal regulators announced the consequences. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered Perez to return every dollar of his profits—all $107,500—and imposed an additional $65,000 civil penalty. He was also barred from trading on prediction markets for three years. The total he owes comes to $172,000. The settlement concluded an investigation that began when Kalshi, the prediction market platform where Perez placed his bets, detected trading patterns that didn't match normal buying and selling behavior. The company's surveillance systems flagged the activity, froze his account with more than $90,000 in locked profits, and referred the case to the CFTC.

The violation was straightforward in its breach of trust. "In his position, Perez had access to presidential speeches prior to those speeches being delivered and Perez misappropriated that information — in breach of his duty of trust and confidence," the CFTC said in its settlement announcement. What made his position valuable—knowing what the President would say before anyone else—was exactly what made his betting illegal. He had information the market didn't have, and he traded on it.

Perez had already been placed on unpaid leave from the White House after the scheme was discovered. A White House official confirmed in July that he was no longer in his position, though the official did not specify whether he had been fired or resigned. Public records show Perez had worked for the Trump administration across both of the president's terms, holding roles as a technical adviser and teleprompter operator. He began his most recent position as a technical adviser for the White House Office in January 2025—just weeks before he started placing his bets.

The CFTC reduced Perez's fine from what it might have been, citing his "exemplary cooperation" with investigators. That cooperation likely helped the agency understand how the scheme worked and may have prevented similar violations. In March, after the White House became aware of the problem, the White House Management Office issued guidance to staff warning them not to place bets on prediction markets using nonpublic information. The warning came too late for Perez, but it signaled the administration's recognition that prediction markets—a growing corner of the financial world—posed a new kind of insider trading risk for government employees with access to sensitive information.

When details of the case became public in mid-July, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it "unfortunate" and "a disgrace." The settlement Friday formalized what had already become clear: a man with access to the President's words had turned that access into personal profit, and the cost of that choice would be substantial. The case also raised a broader question about prediction markets themselves—platforms designed to aggregate information and forecast outcomes—and how they might be vulnerable to people with advance knowledge of events that move markets.