Polymarket Reportedly Paid Creators to Promote Fake Wins

Polymarket reportedly paid content creators to film themselves making fake trades and scoring phony wins.

That’s according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published Sunday (June 21), based on an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the publication, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the prediction market.

According to the report, Polymarket has saturated social media with videos that appear genuine at first. In fact, the company created almost exact copies of its website, then told creators to simulated trades on those duplicate sites without revealing they were being paid to do so.

Polymarket issued a statement to the news outlet in which it said it planned to carry out an audit of active promotional content.

The company added it was “committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets. We are part of a rapidly growing industry and are constantly evaluating ways to improve how we’re engaging and earning the trust of our audience.”

WSJ said it reviewed 1,105 videos posted by 10 creators endorsed by Polymarket’s contractor between December of last year and mid-May of this year. In a majority of the videos, the report said, the creators placed a bet, though clues in the clips indicated that none of the bets were real.

Most just showed the bet being placed, but 118 videos showed creators reacting to outdated footage or phony headlines indicating they’d won. Those videos showed creators winning almost $900,000. In reality, those wagers would have lost more than $166,000, WSJ said. While Polymarket is not available in the U.S., the report said the company’s social media campaign targeted American users, who could access the site via a virtual private network.

In other Polymarket news, the company earlier this month closed its first on-chain institutional block trade connected to AI compute infrastructure, arguing this shows prediction markets can function like commodity futures in the AI era.

“Prediction markets are emerging as one of the most powerful venues for institutional block trades, and this transaction is proof,” Brooke Rizzetto, head of institutional liquidity at Polymarket, said at the time. “Seeing an institutional counterparty use Polymarket to hedge real GPU compute exposure at scale is exactly the future we have been building toward.”

In other prediction markets news, Polymarket rival Kalshi has reportedly tripled its annualized revenue since November, bringing that figure to $2 billion. The Information reported these gains came from trading around the NBA and World Cup games.

Now, the company is in talks with banks about going public, though that is not likely to happen until late 2027 or 2028, the report added.