Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff are among the elected officials pushing back against prediction market platforms after more than $1 million was wagered on the devastating 2025 wildfires, whose impacts continue to reverberate.<\/p>\n
As the Palisades and Eaton fires scorched Los Angeles communities, destroying more than 11,000 homes and upending people\u2019s lives, users placed bets on questions including: \u201cHow many acres will the Palisades wildfire burn in total?\u201d and \u201cWill all wildfires be fully contained by February?\u201d<\/p>\n
According to an Aug. 3 letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman, nine U.S. senators are demanding that \u201cguardrails\u201d be put in place to prevent people from profiting from wildfires and other deadly disasters. Padilla and Schiff also said such wagers raise safety and arson concerns.<\/p>\n
John Ford, an Eaton Fire survivor who lost his home, said he was \u201coutraged\u201d to hear that some people were benefiting from his hardship.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just feel like you\u2019re turning our human suffering and climate disasters into a casino game,\u201d Ford said. \u201cI think money sometimes wrongly drives whether we make a decision to do something or not \u2014 and that\u2019s painful for all of our communities.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement to NBC Los Angeles, Polymarket said that when tragedies strike, \u201cpeople turn to news for commentary, and they come to Polymarket for information.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we are not blind to the risks, removing these markets does not prevent a tragedy but makes the most accurate information less accessible to the people who need it most,\u201d Polymarket said.<\/p>\n
The senators are asking the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to respond by Aug. 14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff are among the elected officials pushing back against prediction market platforms after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[3936,48,52,51,47,50,49,535],"class_list":["post-430292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-california-wildfires","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}