A Times of Israel reporter has been receiving death threats over his refusal to "correct" an article about a missile strike on a city near Jerusalem. The reason? His reporting was the final word that determined a market on Polymarket.

Emanuel Fabian writes:

My minor report on a missile striking an open area was now in the middle of a betting war, with those who had bet “No” on an Iranian strike on Israel on March 10 demanding I change my article to ensure they would win big.

Of course, Fabian refused to amend the article. So, over the course of a weekend, the threats intensified. A person identifying themselves only as "Haim" began texting him in Hebrew over WhatsApp, Fabian wrote:

Later in the afternoon, Haim messaged me again, this time with the most explicit threat yet.

“You have 90 minutes left to update the lie. If you do this — you solve in a minute the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life. And you won’t remember me anymore in a week.”

“If you decide not to correct it, and leave the lie intact, you will discover enemies who will be willing to pay anything to make your life miserable — within the framework of the law.”

“And as far as I know, there are also some people who don’t really care about the law, and you’re going to make them lose about 50 times what you’ll ever make.”

“86 minutes left. You are the only one responsible for your life.”

Thankfully, the threats were hollow. And Fabian, evidently, is a man of solid ethics. But he raises the point: What might less-ethical journalists, or more afraid, journalists do in his situation? "I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings," he wrote.

NPR's Bobby Allyn writes:

An editor who works for YouTube's biggest creator, MrBeast, has been suspended from the prediction market platform Kalshi and reported to federal regulators for insider trading, Kalshi officials said on Wednesday. It's the first time the company has publicly revealed the results of an investigation into market manipulation on the popular app.

The MrBeast employee, whose name was not disclosed, traded around $4,000 on markets related to the streamer, the company said.

Kalshi investigators discovered that the trader had "near-perfect trading success" on bets about the YouTuber's videos with low odds, making the wagers appear suspicious, according to company officials.

Many people place wagers about MrBeast on Kalshi. People bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on what he will say in his next video. There are markets on the number of subscribers he will bring on this year. And people are betting on when exactly MrBeast will get married.

It's astonishing to me that a country that has been so tentative about legalizing online sports gambling has stumbled into permitting these so-called "prediction" markets, setting the conditions for "insider trading" to graduate from Wall Street to every conceivable corner of public life. Everything, and everybody, is now corruptible, and there's no way to stop it at this scale.

Update: Wired reports on a second incident involving Kyle Langford, a former Republican candidate for governor of California:

In the case of the political candidate, Kalshi cited a video posted online “that appeared to show him trading on his own candidacy.” Kalshi froze the candidate’s accounts and reported the activity to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the government agency that oversees prediction markets. It instituted a five-year ban and is fining the account a penalty 10 times the size of the initial trade, which Kalshi says it intends to donate to charity.

It's commendable, I suppose, that it was Kalshi itself that investigated the allegedly illegal trading. Though it'll be harder to stop savvier operators who don't go to the trouble of posting videos of themselves detailing their crimes.