Polymarket, the crypto-fueled prediction market that lets users bet on everything from Hollow Knight: Silksong’s chances of winning Game of the Year to Iran’s chances of getting nuked by the United States, has been paying “mostly college-age creators” to create fake videos of themselves winning huge, six-figure sums on the platform and artificially making said videos go viral by using a “social-media army” to advertise them, according to a new report.
As detailed in the Wall Street Journal’s report, more than 1,100 fake videos, alongside “instructional materials and interviews with creators” who have worked with Polymarket, were reviewed during its investigation.
The videos featuring creators winning massive sums on ridiculous bets were reportedly fabricated using a dummy version of Polymarket’s website, allowing the platform to fake the winnings without having to actually pay out any money. WSJ also notes that the creators Polymarket used to promote said fake bets on platforms such as X updated their bios on social media to include the phrase “@polymarket partner” after being contacted by its journalists.
According to the report, 118 of the faked videos reviewed featured creators winning. The combined winnings faked by said creators totaled almost $900,000. WSJ notes that those who legitimately bet on the same outcomes as the ones featured in Polymarket’s videos would have actually been denied their winnings, and that real-world bets on the outcomes featured in the 118 videos would have resulted not in massive winnings but in losses of “more than $166,000.” (One such video showed a creator winning $100,000 on a bet that President Trump would say the word “McDonald’s” in public that month.) Creators of the faked videos were apparently paid somewhere around “$2,000 to $3,000 a month” for their work.
In a statement provided to Ars Technica, Polymarket did not address the Wall Street Journal’s findings, but stated it was conducting a “comprehensive audit” of its promotional material: “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. As part of that commitment, we are conducting a comprehensive audit of active promotional content to ensure it complies with our standards, as well as applicable regulatory and legal disclosure requirements.”
