Polymarket's whole sell is that you can check every bet on a public blockchain. Its growth, it turns out, ran on bets nobody could check at all.
The Wall Street Journal reviewed 1,105 videos from 10 paid creators, posted between December and mid-May. About 70% showed a bet, and none of them were real.
The staged wins added up to roughly $1.9 million in bets. Many were filmed on lookalike sites like "poiymarket.com," built to copy the real platform.
One clip showed a creator "winning" $100,000 on a bet that Trump would say "McDonald's." He didn't say it publicly that month, and on the real platform, more than 50 people who placed that bet lost.
Across 118 of the videos, creators celebrated about $900,000 in fake wins. The same bets would have lost more than $166,000.
We translate stories like this - what a trust scandal means for a company's path forward - in Market Briefs, five minutes a day, plus a free investing masterclass when you join.
Real bets on the platform settle on a public blockchain - a shared digital ledger anyone can read, like a receipt everyone can see. Trades you can check are the whole pitch.
That's what makes the campaign awkward. Creators earned $2,000 to $3,000 a month, were told to hide the payments, and a marketing firm pushed the clips past 140 million views.
A separate Journal review found most users lose money, even as the clips sold easy profit. The timing stings, too.
The company is trying to bring its exchange into the U.S. legally, years after regulators fined it $1.4 million in 2022 for running an unregistered market. It has since won the go-ahead to run a legal U.S. market.
It also moved its home base to Panama, into a shared law office that once worked with FTX.
The fake clips aimed at U.S. users, who can still reach the offshore site with a VPN.
The company says it will review its ad videos, even as it races a licensed rival, Kalshi, for U.S. users.
Polymarket is asking Americans to trust a public ledger. Its own marketing didn't use one.
For this kind of read on crypto and markets every morning, sign up for Market Briefs and get a 45-minute investing course thrown in as a bonus.
