Sean Fern, a former FBI agent, will join prediction market platform Kalshi to lead the company’s efforts in combating money laundering.
Provided by Kalshi
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Provided by Kalshi
Kalshi, a leading prediction market firm, has hired a former FBI agent to lead its first anti-money laundering team as prediction markets come under increasing legal scrutiny from state and federal regulators.
Sean Fern will work closely with authorities, regulators and senior staff at Kalshi to monitor suspicious and potentially criminal activity there. The platform has seen enormous growth over the last year.
According to the TickerTracker firm, Kalshi has exceeded $260 billion in bets so far this year, triple the amount traded in all of 2025.
In an interview with NPR, Fern, who worked as The Brooklyn federal prosecutor, after his time at the FBI, said his goal is to build defenses against people who try to use the platform to commit financial crimes.
“I want to make sure it’s a difficult place to launder money or evade sanctions and commit fraud,” Fern told NPR on Friday. “On a day-to-day basis, that means knowing who our customers are, knowing where their money is coming from, and making sure we’re not doing business with sanctioned entities or parties,” he said. “And when something seems strange or suspicious, we can spot it and refer it to authorities.”
The announcement echoes what cryptocurrency companies did during the boom times of that sector in the early 2020s. Cryptocurrency exchange Binance, for example, hired former federal prosecutors and FBI agents to bolster its compliance and anti-money laundering divisions. Several years later, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to money laundering charges.
Avoiding his own money laundering scandal, Fern said, is the reason Kalshi contacted him.
At the FBI, Fern was a special agent on the bureau’s international corruption team, where she helped lead the investigation into the multimillion-dollar bribery scheme linked to Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, a scandal that became known as 1MDB.
Kalshi hopes Fern’s addition will lend credibility to the booming platform as it faces increasing scrutiny over insider trading and market manipulation.
Prediction market bettors can place bets on everything from sports to what politicians say at public events and the outcome of elections. Experts have warned that the introduction of betting in areas such as voting and political decisions encourages people to monetize inside information.
Federal regulators and law enforcement in Washington have launched criminal investigations into alleged abuses on prediction market platforms. Earlier this year, regulators settled with former U.S. Rep. George Santos over market manipulation. Federal prosecutors also charged a former U.S. Army soldier and a former Google employee for allegedly using non-public information to get paid at Polymarket, Kalshi’s main rival. In August, regulators fined President Trump’s former teleprompter operator for using advance notice of the president’s speeches to profit in Kalshi’s so-called “mention markets.”
Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said that as banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions use Kalshi, the need to strengthen safeguards against financial crime has become clear. “We’re growing,” Diana said.
The company, whose value is estimated by PitchBook to be around $40 billion, has 250 employees and plans to double its workforce in the next six months.
During her time in federal law enforcement, Fern was one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of OneTaste, an “orgasmic meditation” wellness company whose founders were sentenced to prison following convictions for forced labor conspiracy.
