By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK, April 24 (Reuters) - A U.S. Army soldier charged with making $400,000 by using insider information to bet on the removal of ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been released on $250,000 bond, a Justice Department spokesman said on Friday.
Gannon Van Dyke, who prosecutors say was involved in planning and executing the January 3 capture of Maduro from his Caracas home, was indicted on Thursday in Manhattan federal court on charges including commodities fraud, wire fraud and unlawful
use of confidential information for personal gain.
In ordering Van Dyke, 38, released on Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Meyers in Raleigh, North Carolina, also required him to surrender his passport and give up his firearms unless ordered to possess them through military command. Van Dyke did not enter a plea.
Van Dyke is due to appear on Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett in Manhattan, who will oversee his case going forward. Reuters could not immediately identify his defense lawyer.
In the Justice Department's first-ever filing of insider trading charges involving a prediction market, prosecutors said Van Dyke bet more than $33,000 on Polymarket between December 27, 2025, and January 2, 2026, that Maduro would soon be out of office and that U.S. forces would soon enter Venezuela.
At the time, the markets assigned low probabilities to those events, meaning the wagers earned him more than $400,000, according to the indictment.
Van Dyke withdrew the funds from Polymarket after Maduro's capture, prosecutors said. He later allegedly asked the prediction market to delete his account, in what prosecutors called an effort to conceal his identity.
Polymarket said it referred the matter to the Justice Department and cooperated with the investigation.
"We work proactively with all relevant authorities on any suspicious activity on our marketplace," Polymarket founder and Chief Executive Shayne Coplan said in a post on X on Friday.
Van Dyke, a master sergeant with U.S. Army Special Forces, has been an active-duty soldier since 2008 and is stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
Prosecutors said Van Dyke was involved in the "planning and execution" of the Maduro capture, but did not elaborate. The indictment made note of a photograph Van Dyke uploaded to his Google account in the early morning of January 3, hours after the U.S. military brought Maduro to the USS Iwo Jima amphibious assault ship.
"That photograph depicts Van Dyke on what appears to be the deck of a ship at sea, at sunrise wearing U.S. military fatigues, and carrying a rifle, standing alongside three other individuals wearing U.S. military fatigues," the indictment read.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
