When we were kids, we’d often shout “Wanna bet?” We’d push out our hand, daring a friend to shake it. “Wanna bet? Wanna bet?” As for stakes, we’d yell, “A dollar!” Or “Gentlemen’s bet!” — which usually meant we didn’t have a dollar.
Our wagers were over silly things, like if some baseball player ever hit 40 home runs, or if some girl in grade school said she liked one of our friends. Even at that young age, we sensed this was a kids’ exercise. We didn’t see ourselves betting over such things as adults.
The world has changed. Today you can bet on anything. I mean anything. Sports. Politics. The Oscars. The existence of aliens.
Even warfare.
The dangers of this were brought home starkly last week, when a U.S. special forces soldier, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, was arrested for betting on whether — and when — Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro would be captured.
According to prosecutors, Van Dyke was involved in the planning of the Maduro operation and had access to classified information about it. He allegedly placed numerous bets on the outcome, the last being just hours before American forces captured Maduro in the middle of the night.
Can you imagine? A soldier intricately involved in this covert operation, sneaking off to his phone or computer to lay down a bet on its outcome?
Van Dyke made more than $400,000 on his wagers and reportedly deposited the money — no surprise — in a foreign cryptocurrency account.
A man of our time.
Everyone’s getting in the game
Now, you may ask, how was Van Dyke able to do this? It’s called prediction markets. The concept is not new. Its massive growth is.
Prediction markets take bets on whether certain events will happen. You buy a “contract” for that event with a particular likelihood assigned to it (think “odds”). If the event happens, it pays off.
There are a handful of major outfits that have emerged in this business, led by Kalshi and Polymarket. The latter is where Van Dyke placed his bets on Maduro.
Polymarket allows bettors as young as 18 (even though gambling in general is 21-and-over in America). It They can wager on everything from football games to the coming of the Messiah. To get an idea of how its business has grown, Polymarket was valued at $350 million just two years ago.
Today, that number is $15 billion.
And Polymarket operates with very little traditional oversight. In fact, the entire prediction markets universe has little oversight, considering the billions it is siphoning out of Americans’ pockets.
The Trump administration has not only avoided cracking down on this phenomenon, it has encouraged it. This may be due in part to Donald Trump Jr. being both an adviser to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket.
President Trump, when asked about the Van Dyke case, told reporters, “I think the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.”
At the same time, Trump’s family media company announced plans last year to open its own prediction market, called Trump Predict.
You can’t make this stuff up.
The price we pay
Van Dyke’s actions are but one example of how taking bets on anything can corrupt everything. What’s to stop business insiders from betting on mergers, sports insiders betting on trades, political insiders from betting on resignations or military insiders betting on combat actions?
You could say, “There must be laws about this,” but there aren’t always, and they aren’t always enforced. We have so fallen in love with gambling in this country, that many seem to view wagering as an American right. If you want to risk your money, hey, it’s a free country.
But this is far from free. This is costing people fortunes, livelihoods, and, in extreme cases, their lives. Suicides from gambling debts, according to some studies, are higher than with other addictions. And the number of people developing severe gambling habits is growing, just as the amount of money being wagered is exploding.
Consider that in 2018, the year the Supreme Court cleared the way for sports betting, gross gaming revenue on sports was around $400 million.
Today it is $17 billion.
Young people today sign up for betting sites with worrying regularity. The New York Times recently cited a study showing that 52% of American men between the ages of 18 and 49 have an online sports book account.
Fifty-two percent? This isn’t betting your neighbor five bucks that the Lions will make the Super Bowl. This is a digital gateway to betting on any sport, anywhere, with the press of a button.
What’s really at stake: Trust
Still, at least sports betting has been tirelessly debated. Politics and warfare are far more dangerous, and much less discussed. The rise in prediction markets is a golden invitation for manipulation, insider misbehavior and danger in all those arenas.
Suppose a military person has a lot riding on a combat initiative. Then conditions suddenly change. Will he or she be more loyal to the mission or to their bank account?
Personally, I can’t understand how any of this is permitted, so obvious is the danger. But when you have a country where seemingly every other commercial is for Draft Kings, and a president whose name is actually on a casino, how surprised can we be?
The people behind these prediction markets will argue they are great tools for anticipating outcomes and providing data. Yeah. And pornography is great for developing actors.
Trust is already at an all-time low. When you can’t be sure if something is happening because it was correctly designed or because it is making a gambler money, trust becomes a vapor.
This is a huge issue, friends. And we are not talking about it enough. Supporters of prediction markets will insist they do no harm, and that bad actors like Van Dyke are an anomaly.
Wanna bet?
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates on his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow @mitchalbom on x.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Mitch Albom: America has become a craps table for dangerous things
Reporting by Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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