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Comment by burnhamup | Hacker News Reader

I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.

The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.

And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.

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You can charge anyone in the world with anything, the trouble is getting a judge to agree with you and getting your hands on the person you're charging.

The first problem doesn't seem to be all that hard in the US (unless the inside traders are part of the US government, of course), the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.

If the basis for their charges really is just that he traded in dollars, then this is yet another example why nobody should trust Americans and their currency when it comes to trade. I hope they can come up with something better than that.

> the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.

This actually happens. I know that the FBI once organized an all-expenses-paid trip to a "conference in Hawaii" for certain Chinese chemists it wanted to nab.

The corollary is that if you have reason to expect you're wanted by American Feds, never travel outside China, Russia, and certain European states that are extraordinarily hesitant to extradite to the US (e.g. Ireland).

And never have an emergency (accidentally, FBI-forced landing, etc) causing you to accidentally inhabit those countries either.

I thought I'd heard of this but couldn't find enough examples of this, let alone an FBI induced landing.

It appears REALLY hard to step over jurisdictions.

I did find the PLO terrorist incident from 1985. The terrorists killed an American on a cruiseship, Achille Lauro. Reagan sent a fighter jet to intercept, escort, and force a landing in Italy for the commercial jet the terrorists were later flying on.

There are other examples like forcing downed flights in the hunt for Snowden, but it's super rare and ultimately unlikely.

Oh yeah, it's definitely super rare, especially when we do anything to force the landing. The Snowden example is the only one coming to mind, and that was a decade ago.

There are a number cases where the stop was known ahead of time (like Maher Arar), but those are moderately rare too.

The interesting part is that he got charged with insider trading. A few attorneys on bluesky have pointed out that this is a novel use of this law since previously the trading occurred on regulated markets (e.g. SEC or CFTC regulated markets like stock markets and commodities/futures exchanges).

These markets are regulated by the CFTC, currently, so what exactly is novel here?

Poly market is not a us exchange. Kalshi is.

So is Polymarket US, the separate entity Polymarket created specifically for the USA.

The argument goes that because Polymarket (.com) doesn't effectively block US users, it is in practice operating in the US even though it claims not to be. Similar to how the EU claims jurisdiction over foreign sites that process EU citizen data for GDPR.

They are regulated. That's why Connecticut, Arizona, and Illinois are being sued by the government. They tried to regulate these markets and the CFTC says they regulate them, not the states.

US charged and arrested a man in Venezuela so...

Don’t think they will mobilize 40 elite soldiers to invade Switzerland airspace just because of a small sum of a million dollars

They don't need to because he has already been arrested in New York.

There should be some sort of basic literacy requirement for people to post of this forum.

Don’t so hard on yourself.

He doesn't have any oil. Therefore the US won't invade.

> transacting on systems involving US currency.

Transacting on systems involving a currency (USDC) that is pegged to a US currency.

Pretty sure he sold Swiss Francs for USDC and deposited those onto Polymarket (after running them through mixers -- hence the money laundering charges).

A little bit of an open secret, but insider trading is a large part of what makes prediction markets valuable to society on the whole.

However, it requires a small set of people to lose money so that the rest of us can have a clearer picture of the future.

He was arrested in New York, so he was in the US

That doesn't mean he has committed a crime in the US though.

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