There are a total of 5 people involved in insider trading during the war, and the one who made the most money was caught.

War Insider Trading Involving 5 People—The One Who Made the Most Money Gets Caught

By Liu Kaiwen

Source:

Repost: Mars Finance

On April 24, Eastern Time, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of active-duty Army Special Forces Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke.

The indictment released by the DOJ the same day shows that Van Dyke took part in the operation on January 3 of this year to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from the presidential palace in Caracas.

Reports say that just before the operation, Van Dyke placed bets on Maduro being captured via prediction markets, earning more than $400,000. While the report did not disclose specific account details, by cross-referencing the mentioned bet directions and profit figures, we identified account 0x31a5.

This is one of the five insider accounts explicitly named and marked by PolyBeats in two consecutive reports on January 4 and January 7.

Van Dyke account recap

The timeline goes back to January 4.

After the Maduro arrest, PolyBeats immediately broke down on-chain data piece by piece at the earliest opportunity, identified 5 accounts, and completed a public report in less than 24 hours after the operation ended. For details, see “They Missed $2 Million Because Maduro Was Not Going to Be at Home for the New Year.”

Among the five, Van Dyke’s account was the most profitable. The account was registered on December 26, 2025. Since then, it placed a series of bets highly related to the capture operation—such as “Maduro stepping down” and “U.S. military entering Venezuela.” The total principal was about $30,000, and total profits exceeded $400,000.

On the day the operation took place, the account withdrew most of the funds in it, then transferred them to an offshore cryptocurrency account, before finally routing them into a newly opened brokerage account.

On January 6—three days after the operation—media began reporting abnormal transactions related to the event on Polymarket. On the same day, the account submitted a deletion request to Polymarket, citing “unable to access the registered email.” At the same time, it changed the registered email on the cryptocurrency exchange to an anonymous email that had been secretly created as early as December 14.

A new account, precise positioning, a withdrawal on the day of the incident, and destroying traces afterward—this operating pattern is exactly the anomalous feature we highlighted in our January recap.

Today, the DOJ gave this address a name: Gannon Ken Van Dyke.

The story is not about just one person

Van Dyke’s arrest is the first instance in Polymarket’s insider trading history where the DOJ has formally indicted a person. But this story has never been only about him.

In the two PolyBeats reports in January, a total of 5 accounts were labeled. Besides Van Dyke, the other 4 still have no official investigation information to date:

0xa72db1749e9ac2379d49a3c12708325ed17febd4, profit $74,982;

0x6baf05d193692bb208d616709e27442c910a94c5, profit $145,619;

0x168b100d7a6620a2f49a455344c2c006eaf1714b, profit about $34,000;

0x168b100d7a6620a2f49a455344c2c006eaf1714b, profit about $54,000.

Why haven’t these four accounts been caught yet?

The most direct layer is the amount. Van Dyke’s profit is close to $410,000—the highest among the four accounts—making law enforcement priorities even clearer.

A more critical layer is identity. Van Dyke is an active-duty service member who signed confidentiality agreements and directly participated in the operation planning, which makes his identity verification path very short. By contrast, the real identities and sources of information for the other 4 accounts are still unclear. If they obtained secondary information, the legal boundaries would become far more blurred, and the difficulty of bringing charges would rise significantly as well.

There is also another layer: Polymarket’s own reporting boundary. The platform claims it proactively discovered Van Dyke and reported him to law enforcement. However, there are evidently 4 other accounts with abnormal activity that were not reported along with him. The platform has offered no explanation for this.

But one thing is changing this situation.

In March this year, Polymarket released an enhanced market integrity rule, clearly prohibiting three types of conduct: trading based on information that must remain confidential due to legal requirements; trading based on other people’s insider information; and participation in relevant markets by individuals who have power that can affect the outcome of an event. As the rules rolled out, this DOJ indictment also conveyed the same message to everyone: the platform is willing to cooperate with investigations, blockchain records will not disappear, and investigations themselves can last for months.

It took nearly four months from Van Dyke building a position to his arrest. For the other 4 accounts—and for everyone who has an information advantage and tries to conduct insider trading in prediction markets—this arrest may be only the beginning.