06/28/2026: Betting on War, The Looting of Cambodia

0:08As long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers. But never quite like this. Tonight, new evidence that betters, including a U.S. soldier, may have profited by using inside information to wager on when and how military operations will unfold. A soldier using classified intelligence to trade. Unprecedented. There is nothing to compare that to. This is a new kind of insider trading. For a year, 60 Minutes investigated the theft of Cambodia's cultural heritage. Thousands of sacred stone, bronze, and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country, leaving empty pedestals where gods and deities once stood.

0:54We found some of them on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. How did these looted treasures get here, and will they ever be returned? We are on the verge of returning a number of them. All of them? That I can't say. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Leslie Stahl. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

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1:59The war with Iran and the U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro have carried the usual hallmarks of conflict. Soldiers, strategy, casualties, cost. But they've also been accompanied by a new feature, betting on war. This year alone, more than a billion dollars has been staked online on military decisions and outcomes. As if they were wagering on football games or Oscar winners, bettors all over the globe have taken positions, some suspiciously timed and with information seemingly too specific for a civilian outsider, on when and how an attack might happen, even the fate of world leaders.

2:38As we reported in May, it's created a whole new category of insider trading. As long as there have been wars, there have been war profiteers. but never quite like this. Cloaked in night, shrouded in secrecy, U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3rd. He was taken to the U.S. to face drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges. You need to bring them to the other courthouse without blocking his way, please. As it turned out, the president of Venezuela wasn't the only figure in the operation who would find himself confronting federal charges. U.S.

3:16Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was involved in the planning and execution of the Venezuela mission, was charged in April with using classified intelligence to place bets based on when the surprise raid would unfold. If the allegations are true, this is one of the worst betrayals of trust in this area that I can remember and possibly ever. Americans should feel confident that the most important little agency they've probably never heard of is on the job. Now a private lawyer in Washington, Rob Schwartz, until last year, worked for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency policing fraud and insider trading.

3:57A soldier using classified intelligence to trade. Unprecedented. Classified intelligence that he knew about because he helped plan and to execute the mission. There is nothing to compare that to. The Justice Department alleges Van Dyke made a series of wagers totaling roughly$34 ,000, including a half dozen the day before the raid. He ended up netting more than$400 ,000. According to the indictment, Van Dyke immediately withdrew his profit, then tried to delete his betting account on Polymarket, the world's biggest online prediction market. The 38-year-old Army Master Sergeant has pleaded not guilty.

4:39Polymarket says it cooperated with law enforcement. If you are a corporate executive and you're privy to non-public business information, you go trade on that, that's insider trading. Everybody knows that. But the same thing exists in prediction markets where this soldier is alleged to have traded. You're saying different contexts from what we usually think. Two guys at the golf course are winking and whispering and tipping each other off. But this is still meeting the definition of insider trading? Exactly right. This is a new kind of insider trading. Spiking in popularity, prediction markets, including polymarket, offer wagers on the likelihood of future events.

5:21Will the Dodgers win the World Series? Will Jesus return in 2026? For that matter, in a 60 Minutes interview, would President Trump say the word trillion more than 10 times? Turned out that one didn't pay off. But lately, another kind of wager has found popularity. What will happen in military conflicts? Dates of attack. Will an airspace close? Will enriched uranium change hands? You can bet on it. You can also bet on this. Insiders, people holding non-public information, will be laying down their money too. In the U.S., it's prohibited to make military bets on platforms like Polymarket, though it's easy to find digital workarounds, as Gannon Ken Van Dyke allegedly did.

6:06Here's what's more astounding than the existence of military bets, how often they pay off. It's alarming to see a culture around betting on war. Michelle Kendler Kretsch and her team at the Anti-Corruption Data Collective examined polymarket bets on military outcomes. She looked specifically at long-shot wagers, bets with less than 35 percent odds. Despite being underdogs, they won more than they lost, a telltale sign, she says, of, quote, systemic insider trading. Give me the apples-to-apples comparison. This military bets versus, say, sports wagering. So military bets are 52 % success rate. Sports, 7%.

6:50Wildly disproportionate to what conventional probability should be telling us. Absolutely. In Ocean Away, another team of digital detectives say they too have identified crooked bettors wagering on war. This might be the most insane pattern we have found on Polymarket so far. Based in Paris, Nicholas Weiman's small data analytics firm Bubble Maps creates visualizations of bets on Polymarket to spot bubbles, or clusters, of suspect traders. One paradox of Polymarket, everything about the trades is totally transparent and public, except the traders themselves remain anonymous. This big cluster in the middle, no one talked about it.

7:34The firm's head of investigations goes by his online handle, Deabs. He asked us to obscure his identity over fears of retaliation for his detective work. They shared for the first time what they believe is a more egregious insider trading case than Dan and Ken Van Dyke's. We spotted nine polymarket accounts, all connected, who made collectively$2.4 million, betting almost exclusively on U.S. military operations. Van Dyke made$400 ,000, here$2.4 million. And now here's the crazy part. 98 % win rate. Wait, wait, wait, wait. 98. 98%. This is like winning the lottery multiple times, you know? The linked accounts made dozens of winning bets on the specific dates of pivotal moments in the war with Iran, even when the odds were low.

8:26The first U.S. strikes, the removal of Iran's supreme leader, the announcement of a ceasefire. How do we know this isn't just someone who has really good instincts? Luck alone cannot explain those numbers. If you know this, why don't federal prosecutors? Well, hopefully with your interview, they're going to know this. We talked to one source in the Defense Department with relation to Sergeant Van Dyke, and he said, listen, there are dozens more of these. Van Dyke was just a small fish. For sure. There's so many people involved in the planning and the execution of a military operation. A former U.S.

9:02military officer, Deeb speaks from firsthand experience when he says military bets are ripe for corruption. You have, obviously, the government officials, but you also have the military planners, right? You have the military intelligence analysts and even spouses. They hear things, and that means that there, consequently, are a lot of potential insiders. And it's not just the voguish, high-tech, online prediction markets where trades based on war have raised intense suspicions. It's happening on the old-school and heavily regulated commodities markets, too. I'm highly suspicious at this point, and I'm not the only one.

9:39Any trader right now is highly suspicious. A former commodities trader, David Covell is now a New York lawyer representing victims of fraud on the same markets he once traded. In 2021, he secured the largest whistleblower award for commodities market manipulation in U.S. history. Well, this is a classic graph that any commodities trader will understand. Covell walked us through the morning of March 23rd. Fighting had been raging for three-plus weeks, and it was a slow trading day in oil futures. If you see the chart, you'll see that no one is trading during that time period. Why would you trade at that time?

10:17It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a real reason. Then, according to data the financial firm LSEG provided us, suddenly at 6.50 a.m., more than$800 million was staked on the chance of oil prices dropping. Fifteen minutes later, President Trump posted on True Social that the White House in Iran had, quote, very good and productive conversations about ending hostilities. The news sent the price of oil plummeting more than 10 percent. What kind of profit is that resulting in? We're talking tens of millions could be$80 million. You see this graph and you think insider trading. That's a natural conclusion to draw.

10:56I can't know it without knowing what happened, but it's a natural conclusion to draw. Covell is not alone in finding this highly dubious. 60 Minutes has learned federal investigators are probing these oil market trades as well. What are the odds the government knows the identity of whoever executed that? If they go to the exchanges, they can know them. This could have been someone inside the U.S. This could have been someone from a foreign country. This could have been an enemy. Identifying who it was would be the secret to figuring out whether it was insider trading or not. It's not just markets that risk manipulation by war bets.

11:29It's truth as well. Emmanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for the Times of Israel, thought little of a piece he wrote in March about an Iranian missile strike in an empty forest near Jerusalem. But soon after he published the account, Fabian received a barrage of messages asking him to change his story. He ignored most, but they turned darker. One of them was, you're going to make us lose$900 ,000, and we'll invest even more than that to finish you, is what he wrote. He also wrote details about my siblings as well. He said, I know how often you visit your family. What's your fear factor at this point?

12:06I was quite worried. He investigated and found war bets on Pali market hinging on whether an Iranian missile would enter Israel, specifically on March 10th. And Fabian's small news story voided the side of the bets predicting no missile, angering the losers. It was at$14 million that were being wagered there. $14 million? Yeah, but by the time it closed, it actually went up to$22 million, if I'm not mistaken. Also, the person who wrote them, they wrote that, you know, if you abide by my instructions and change it, then, you know, you can end with money in your pocket and this will all be over.

12:39Despite this pressure campaign against you that escalated to death threats, you did not go in and change your copy. Do you worry that other people might not have your principled stance? I do worry. We know when there's a lot of money involved, in this case$22 million, I think that can cause people to lie. Fabian reported the threats to the police and to Polymarket, which said that threatening a journalist was unacceptable and banned the accounts involved. Polymarket has said they work proactively on any suspicious activity constantly behind the scenes. Overseeing all this, playing sheriff in this new Wild West?

13:19In the U.S., it's that niche government agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, set up in the 70s to regulate food prices. Historically led by a commission of five, today it's run by one person, Michael Selig, a 36-year-old whom President Trump nominated chairman last fall. We will hold whoever is engaging in fraudulent, manipulative, or insider trading activity accountable to the American people. But enforcement actions have dropped by more than two-thirds since 2024. Staffing has dropped sharply too. Sealy declined our interview request, though the CFTC told us it is hiring more staff and using AI to go after bad actors.

14:03And government officials are aware of the new potential for corruption. In March, the White House issued a memo to staffers noting it is a criminal offense for anyone to use non-public information on prediction markets. Where do you draw the line? I guess reasonable people can debate where the line is. Source after source told us they fear today's insider trading scandal is tomorrow's national security scandal. If market watchers can spot irregular trades, surely enemies can too. and they'll make their war plans accordingly. Just to put it plainly, this could be putting people's lives at risk.

14:39Other adversaries may be using this information in order to plan their own strategy. If you're taking a futures position, a year from now, Sergeant Van Dyke is the only person charged with insider trading? No. I think it's just going to multiply from here. In fact, it has multiplied. Since our story aired in May, federal prosecutors brought another case, this time against a software engineer at Google who allegedly used confidential information from inside the company to make bets on Polymarket. According to prosecutors, he took home more than a million dollars in profit. His lawyers say he plans to plead not guilty.

15:26What if everything you learn in history class was only half the story? I'm Dr. Harini Bhatt, host of Hidden History. Every Monday, I go where history gets mysterious. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. On Hidden History, I treat these moments like open case files. Not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. Listen to and follow Hidden History, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

16:00The theft of Cambodia's cultural treasures, thousands of sacred stone, bronze, and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country, might just be the greatest art heist in history. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France. But in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil, the looting became a global business, much of it run by a British man named Douglas Latchford. He kept some of it for himself, but much of what his gang of thieves stole, Latchford then sold to wealthy private collectors and some of the most important museums around the world.

16:40As we first reported in 2023, Cambodia's government has spent the last 14 years trying to track it all down and bring their history and heritage home. Angkor Wat, with its towering spires, is the glory of Cambodia. Nearly a thousand years old, it's one of the biggest and most extraordinary religious temples in the world, sprawling across 400 acres. Originally built to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, it then became a Buddhist temple and remains a place of worship today. You can wander here for weeks, lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone corridors and sacred chambers. But the scars of plunder run deep.

17:23Looters have hacked off the heads of many statues. They've stolen bodies as well. Empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood. On some, only the feet remain.

17:37It's worse in the rest of Cambodia's 4 ,000 temples. Nearly all have been looted. This one is 100 miles northeast of Angkor Wat on a remote mountain called Sandak. This was hit very heavily by the looting gangs. They found gold, they found statues, they found many, many things. That's Brad Gordon, an American lawyer who's been working with the Cambodian government for 14 years, tracking down its stolen treasures. He brought us to Sandak with his team of investigators, archaeologists, and art scholars. This is so cool. In the temple's crumbling courtyard, little remains, mostly empty pedestals scattered among the Sralau trees.

18:20It's remarkable to me just how much stuff is just scattered on the ground. Yes. It's like a pedestal graveyard. We've all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them. And I don't think people realize the feet were hacked off, because in order to steal them, that's the easiest way to get them off the pedestal. We know when the looters came to sites like this, the first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. And then later on, maybe they come back and get the torso. but they were not very careful, so they left behind pieces.

18:56For Cambodians, these statues are not just works of art, they are sacred deities that hold the souls of their ancestors to whom they ask for guidance and pray. This is incredible. These were all looted. Yes, all looted. All of these heads cut off. Phoreng Sakana, Cambodia's Minister of Culture, is in charge of the government's efforts to track down their stolen gods. We met her in a closely guarded warehouse not far from Angkor Wat, where more than 6 ,000 pieces from temples across the country are stored for safekeeping, each one sculpted by an artisan from an ancient Khmer empire that lasted for more than five centuries and spanned Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.

19:41So the statues have a soul. The statues are, are they living? Of course, yes. And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear. They will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside, in the society also? They're watching? They're watching. Everywhere. Phorang Sakhanah's entire family was killed in the genocide that began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist group, took over, forcing millions of Cambodians into labor camps. Some two million people, nearly a quarter of the population, were slaughtered or starved to death. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979, but fighting and instability continued for decades, leaving Cambodia's temples unprotected and vulnerable.

20:33easy targets for unscrupulous antiquities dealers like Douglas Latchford. Who was Douglas Latchford? I would say that he was in many ways the mastermind behind the greatest art heist in history. The greatest art heist in history? Yes, in terms of scope and multitude of crime sites and the enormous amount of statues that were taken out. Latchford lived in Thailand, an enigmatic British businessman he began collecting in the 1960s. He had, it seems, two great loves, Cambodian antiquities and Thai bodybuilders, who sponsored Bangkok's biggest bodybuilding competition, the Latchford Classic. How would you describe him?

21:16He was extremely deceptive. I think in many ways was ruthless. But he hid that behind this incredible facade of charm. Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia's culture, a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities. Many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen. He was using the books as sales catalogs. You know, he was handing them out, he was using them to sell pieces, and he understood a certain psychology of collectors out there that if they see something in a beautiful book, they think it's legitimate.

22:03You're doing the transcript right now, right? Those books have been an invaluable guide for Brad Gordon and his team, helping them compile a database of thousands of missing artifacts, many of which they didn't know existed until Latchford published photos of them. Gordon's team got their big break when they met this man in 2012. He was a former Khmer Rouge child soldier and leader of a gang of looters. His name was Day Duck. That first meeting, I didn't really know who we had met. You know, I knew that he was important. I knew that many people were telling me he was the best. And I knew that he was feared.

22:40Why were people afraid of him? You know, over the years, he had killed many people. It turned out Day Duck had worked for decades supplying Douglas Latchford with thousands of treasures. And he was amazed to see them again in Latchford's books. He kept opening the book and going back to the front cover and going through and tapping and saying, I know this one, I know this one, I know this one. And when he says he knew this one, he means he helped loot those ones. That's what we learned later, yeah. Day Duck became a key confidential source for Gordon's team. They gave him a codename, Lion, to protect his identity and followed him to dozens of temples where he confessed what he'd found and how he'd stolen it.

23:24He would say to us, I'm going to transfer everything in my head to you. I'm going to tell you everything, every secret. You felt like his memory was very good. It was accurate. It was unbelievable. He remembered the size of everything measured against his body. He would use his arm to show us how long a statue was. Why do you think he wanted to cooperate? You know, he felt tremendously guilty about many things he had done in his life, about the killing, about the looting, and we offered him a road to redemption, a way to do something really good at the end of his life. They recorded hundreds of hours of Lyon's testimony.

24:07He explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples using shovels, chisels, metal detectors, even dynamite, to find and dig out treasures. Dozens of men would hoist heavy stone statues onto ox carts before transporting them across the border into Thailand and into the hands of Douglas Latchford. Lyon never met Latchford, but he'd sent him photographs of artifacts he could choose from. We hear about them saying, oh, we had to go to this temple and take a photo, and then sending it back. You know, my sense is he was shopping. He had a list. The looters knew his priorities. Like these, which came from a temple complex called Koke.

24:49The statues from there had a distinctive style that Latchford loved. It was, however, a dangerous business. Most looters only made enough to buy food for their families, and fighting between rival gangs was common. People were killed over these antiquities. Do you look at these as blood statues? For sure. They're blood antiquities. Whenever I see a statue, I think about who died to get this out of the ground or get it out of a temple and to move it here. So, so much of this looting was done in the shadow of the war, shadow of the genocide. It was this 500-pound sandstone warrior from Coquet that appeared in a Sotheby's auction catalog in 2011 that put Douglas Latchford on the radar of U.S.

25:34law enforcement. Its feet were missing, and the price tag? An estimated$2 to$3 million. When it appeared in the market, there were a number of archaeologists, a number of people who immediately recognized the source of the statue as being a specific temple in Cambodia. It came from Kokeh. That's right. Until he retired in 2023, J.P. Labatt was a special agent on the Cultural Property, Art and Antiquities Unit with Homeland Security. A team from the U.S. Attorney's Office at the Southern District of New York, traveled to Cambodia to inspect the site where the statue had been removed. And so the base was still there with the feet still in the ground.

26:19And so they were able to match that base and feet to the statue. And that was enough evidence to get the statue pulled off the market? That's right. After years of legal wrangling, Sotheby's finally agreed to send this stolen warrior back to Cambodia. A ceremony was held welcoming at home, and investigators were able to trace its original sale back to Douglas Latchford, who was asked about its repatriation in a German documentary in 2014. Is it a good day for Cambodia, or is it a bad day for the art market if these things are coming back? It's a good day for Cambodia. It's a bad day for the art market.