The Journal. - How Polymarket Made Fake Bets Go Viral

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Hundreds of social media videos showed people hitting it big on Polymarket. But it turns out, none of it was real. WSJ’s Caitlin Ostroff and Katherine Long report on their investigation into a fake viral marketing campaign. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: - Insiders Are Cashing In on Prediction Markets - How Betting on U.S. Politics Is Getting Big Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bro, what? Will Trump say Barack Hussein Obama this week? 25%. Bro, he has to. There are these videos you might have seen on TikTok or Instagram. They all follow the same kind of pattern. There's often someone who looks like a college student on their computer, looking at the betting site polymarket.

They have tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in their polymarket account. They place a bet. The bets often seem trivial, Like, will Donald Trump say a certain word by a certain day? And the people in the videos make it seem like you're being lit in on a secret. Bro, what? Will Trump say hat this week?

35%. Bro, this is crazy. They press the buy button. Confetti explodes across their screen. Then the camera cuts to them in front of a television. They're watching Donald Trump give a speech. He'll take other things, but not a free head. There it is.

It happened. Trump said hat. They jump up. They scream with joy. They're so excited. They've just won money. Yes. Our colleague Catherine Long has been covering prediction markets, along with data reporter Kailen Ostroff. And in the videos, these people will make winning look easy. Here's Kailin. They report to make tens of thousands, sometimes more of dollars.

And for college students, that is an insane amount of money. Yeah, for anybody that's a lot of money. For anybody, that's a lot of money, but especially for college students, you know, you're covering rent and you're throwing a really good party. Yeah. It's a lot of Chipotle Bulls. But it's not just Chipotle Bull money. In the videos, Polymarket looks like a side hustle or even a main hustle. Take one woman named Hyen Win.

She lives in San Francisco. She's in her mid-20s, and she appears to have this glamorous life based on her polymarket earnings. And one video, she's dancing on a beach with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, and the text overlaying the video says, Polymarket funds my life. And videos show her Polymarket account appears to have tens of thousands of dollars in it. That means she's sitting on a lot of cash. In another video, she's wearing a gown. Text on screen says, I could literally kiss the rich man that showed me this.

Then it cuts to her trading on Polymarket. And so you did an investigation. and what did you discover about these videos? We discover that none of it was real. Literally none. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Monday, July 6th.

Coming up on the show, how Polly Market made fake bets go viral. This episode is presented by SAP. Your company's ambitions can't be held back by long implementation, surprise costs, or empty AI promises. SAP Grow AI Cloud ERP gets you live fast, keeps pricing predictable and delivers built-in AI that gets results the first day, not someday, all on a single platform that's easy to manage, industry-ready, and designed to scale with your business. Bring it with SAP Grow. AICloud ERP for any size business.

SAP.com slash grow. As they dove into the brave new world of prediction markets, Catherine and Caitlin have been spending a lot of time together. To quote a phrase, I've previously used trauma bonded at this point, probably. Or joined at the hip, I believe, you said recently in a text message, yes. But Caitlin's the real data whiz on the team. Catherine has the ability to find stuff that no one else does. So it's a dual effort. I love going down a rabbit hole.

It's one thing about me. Prediction markets let you bet on everything. From who will win an election to whether it will rain tomorrow, to whether Jesus will return to Earth by 2027. They've been around in some form for a couple decades, But online platforms like Polymarket are a recent phenomenon. Here's Caitlin. These are companies that have really scaled up over the last two years.

Polymarket and its rival Kalshi, both are valued at tens of billions of dollars. It's attracted huge money from investors. We should say that Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. While reporting on Polymarket, Catherine and Caitlin kept coming across these videos. They showed regular people, usually college-aged, usually men, amassing huge wallets on polymarket, which seemed kind of unlikely. Because remember, this is essentially gambling.

No one actually knows the future. And these videos seem to follow a template. They'd start with a similar hook. Bro, bro, bro, what? Bro, what? Bro what? Wait, what? As the bet was placed, there'd be a moment of disbelief and suspense.

Bro, there's no way this is real right now. Wait, this has to be free money, right? And then, if they won, a celebration. There were literally hundreds of videos like this. They didn't look like ads, per se, but they definitely made Polly Market look good. We weren't sure whether they were being paid by Polly Market, but they seemed to post a lot about Polly Market, and they seemed to be making a lot of money on Polly Market. These videos made Caitlin and Catherine curious.

What was going on here? To get to the bottom of it, they thought maybe they could follow the money. We were wondering if we could find their wallets, basically, and see how much money they were actually making. They're crypto wallets, to be exact. Because Pollymarket uses crypto for all of its trades, every single bet is technically public, kept on a virtual ledger called the blockchain. These incredibly lucky bets should be findable. Right, like, could we find the actual trades? Could we understand, you know, the mechanics of how that's.

was happening. So that's an incredible question. Walk me through how you started reporting this out. So back in 2024, when I had started looking at Polymarket, I had started building this database of all of the trades that exist on Polymarket. Sometimes I hoard data just to see if it comes in handy in the future. This is one of those cases. This is the same thing I say about white t-shirts. Exactly. Sometimes things just come in handy. Yeah, exactly. So she started searching her database, using information from the videos. What day the bet was placed, how much money was won. And again and again, we could not find anything. Katelyn worried that her database was incomplete, that she'd been hoarding useless data. But then, she and Catherine got a text.

I'd left the office and I got a text on my phone from our colleague Neil, who was banging his head against the wall, going through some of these videos. And he said, guys, I figured it out. I just watched a video where instead of entering the URL polymarket.com, the creator actually goes to a website called poeymarket.com. I said P-O-I-Y instead of P-O-L-Y? That's right. Yeah. Uh-huh. Which, by the way, I mean, a capital I looks a lot like an L.

It's indistinguishable. Yeah. So then did you immediately type in P-O-I? Oh, yeah. And what did you... I think all of us typed in P-O-E-Markin on our phones. And what did you find? when you pulled up that website.

It goes to this password-protected page. Catherine and Caitlin had assumed the video showed real bets on polymarket.com. But with this discovery, they'd just learned that the creators were using a fake version of the site. After we discovered Po'i-E Market, we started noticing small inconsistencies between the websites the creators were using and Polymarket.com's actual interface, their actual website. For example, the fake site would sometimes have a citation. on the page saying source polymarket.com. But the real site doesn't have that.

It doesn't need to cite itself. There are other sort of small glitches too. I mean, we noticed in some of the videos the buttons where you click buy. Usually those buttons say yes or no. In some of the videos that we saw, they didn't say yes or no. They would say, you know, yes and then the name of the team or an abbreviation for the team. In one video of a bet on a sporting event, the button that should say no actually said N-I-R for the Northern Ireland soccer team being bet on.

It looked like a stupid coding error. As Catherine and Caitlin look closer at the videos themselves, they noticed more fissiness. Take this one by a business student in Vancouver, Canada, named George Makahara. Trump said McDonald's in January? He appears to place a $1,000 bet on whether Trump will say the word McDonald's in January.

Then, the video cuts to Makahara watching Trump give a speech. Good deal as usual. But you know, in the old days, McDonald's... No! Machahara jumps out of his seat. In the video, it looks like he's just won $100,000. In reality, that Trump's speech took place two months earlier. In November, not January.

In dozens of the videos, the timeline of events was manipulated, showing creators reacting to things that actually happened weeks or months in the past. And they weren't actually making bets at all. They were just recreating the appearance of an instance in which somebody won. Yes. Yeah, that's right. It was all fake. Like, the whole thing looked very real, but no real money was ever placed on any of these bets.

If you added up all the bets made in these videos, in this alternate reality, it looked like the users made more than $900,000 in total. But in the real world, Caitlin and Catherine crunched the number. And if those users had actually made all of those bets, like that fake McDonald's one, they would have lost $166,000. So not only did they not win, they would have actually lost had they actually done the thing that they were showing. That's right. I mean, what were you thinking as you were making these discoveries?

Actually, I don't know what I was thinking. I was just kind of stunned. I was in disbelief. I was in shock. I was like, what a horrible time to live on social media. One thing I thought a lot about during this reporting was, is this just social media these days? Can I believe anything that I see online? Is it all just undisclosed advertisements at this point?

After discovering all this, Kailin and Catherine started reaching out to the video creators themselves. After being contacted, some put Polymarket partner in their posts, or they took them down. Some said they were paid about $2,000 to $3,000 a month for these posts. The users we mentioned, George Makahara and Hyan Wynn, both declined a comment. After Caitlin and Catherine reached out to Polly Market, that fake website, Poe Market, the one with an I instead of an L, was taken down. The company said in a statement that it was, quote, 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.

End quote. So, why was Polymarket doing all of this? That's next. Polymarket is one of the world's largest prediction markets, worth about $14 billion. But in the past year, it's seen some fierce competition. The two biggest prediction markets, Polymarket, and CaliChi, are both in a head-to-head against each other. Interestingly, Polly Market, which started out, sort of in the top.

spot was overtaken by Kelshi when it comes to the volume traded on prediction markets last year. So Polymarket is maybe feeling a little bit of pressure. They're feeling threatened. There's new competitors, too. Robin Hood and Fandul have also launched prediction markets. At the same time, Polymarket's main crypto-based platform has technically been banned from operating in the U.S. since 2022. Polymarket reincorporated that platform in Panama. The company recently released a separate US app, but it has far fewer users than its main site. In general, Polymarket is trying to grow as fast as possible,

and it knows that it needs a constant stream of new users on the platform to make it profitable and fun for the existing users to trade. To grow, Polymarket launched an aggressive marketing campaign. And a big part of that was those videos, where creators made fake bets and won loads of fake money. But Caitlin and Catherine soon realized that Polymarket didn't stop there. There's actually a whole other layer to this story. How did you discover that this clipping stuff was going on?

We rabbit hole. We love the internet. The rabbit hole they went down was into a recent marketing phenomenon known as clipping. The goal of clipping is to create this appearance of a ground. swell of organic interest in a product or a brand. It's this idea that, you know, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, people are talking about this phenomenon. Catherine started looking around for websites that recruit clippers from around the world. And almost immediately I stumbled on a website that was recruiting clippers for Pollymarket.

She discovered that Pollymarket was working with a third-party marketing company called VIRality. Virality paid a global army of contractors to clip and share the fake Pollymarket videos. On their journey down the rabbit hole, Kayleen and Catherine made another discovery online. And interestingly enough, a bunch of instructional materials for the clippers were just sitting there. Entirely out in the open. Oh my God. So it was just sitting there. They hit a gold mine.

They found a bunch of training materials where virality instructed its clippers on how to make fake accounts. Here's how you warm it up. Here's how your profile should look. here's how you make your videos seem organic and not like their brand promotional content. The clippers then reposted the fake polymarket videos thousands of times, sometimes with new music or overlaid text. Virality declined a comment. In their digging, Catherine and Kalin also reviewed internal chat logs.

They could see close to 20,000 messages between these clippers and virality, the marketing firm. And something became very clear. The campaign was aimed at Americans. According to these materials, virality only paid clippers if at least 60% of their audience was in the U.S. And in the chat logs, they could see Clippers swapping tips on how to reach U.S. users. Like they would say, well, are you using a U.S. phone number? Can you get a U.S. SIM card? These are all of the ways in which you can try and make sure that your account is reaching a U.S. audience,

even though you are a teenager sitting in Asia. And some of these people who were clippers would disclose that they were 14 years old in doing this. Yeah, there were a bunch of messages that were in Tagalog. You know, there were a bunch of messages about being a student in India. So it was pretty clear from the message logs that the clippers were mostly teens, they were mostly living in Asia, they weren't getting paid very much, and they were all swapping tips on how to make it seem like they were in the U.S. Turns out, paying a legion of teenagers in Asia to repost clips is effective marketing.

On their own, the fake videos that Caitlin and Catherine reviewed got around 10 to 15 million views in total. With the clipping campaign, the videos racked up over 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. That's according to the analytics provider, tubular. That's 10 times the original reach. You might be wondering, aren't there laws against deceptive advertising? Yes, there are indeed. Federal law requires brands to be truthful about what they're promoting. although there is some gray area.

Kately and Catherine reached out to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC. That's the federal body that regulates prediction markets and enacted that U.S. polymarket ban in the first place. When we asked the CFTC about the findings in our story, they said that reporting like the journals was what made it more important for offshore prediction markets to come back to the United States where they could be more effectively regulated by the CFTC. In other words, that CFTC is saying,

Well, they're kind of outside of our jurisdiction because they're not technically here. Yeah, that's right. Subsequently, two senators called on the CFTC to investigate based on our reporting. And we also learned that the CFTC has an ongoing investigation into Polly Market. What about the Federal Trade Commission? Doesn't the Federal Trade Commission regulate advertising? The Federal Trade Commission declined to comment, citing a policy of not commenting on potential investigations. More broadly, the Trump administration has taken a relaxed approach to regulating

prediction markets. Several states have tried to rein in those businesses, but the CFTC has sued to block those regulations. Trump recently called politicians who want the states to regulate these markets, quote, scum in a true social post. Trump's son, Don Jr., is an investor in polymarket. A spokesperson for Don Jr. didn't respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesman said there are no conflicts of interest, and that Trump acts in the best interests of the American public. Are these ads at all in any way an illustration of the kind of money that people can make on polymarket? No, no. Most people lose money on polymarket.

Who does win money on polymarket? Almost nobody. Previously we reported that 70% of polymarket users lose money. That's based on Caitlin's incredible data analysis. Caitlin founded about two-thirds of the profits on polymarket go to 0.1% of users. And those users tend to be small hedge funds and trading firms that are informed by reams of data. Meanwhile, the average better who's losing money looks a lot like the people in those fake videos. The primary audience for people to gamble, whether it's sports betting or prediction markets, is young men.

As Caitlin and Catherine were wrapping up their reporting, they started noticing a lot of new polymarket videos about the World Cup. Like the other videos, they also showed trading on what appears to be a fake version of Polymarket. Wait, what? 2026 FIFA World Cup winner. If I scroll all the way down, how does Saudi Arabia only have a 0.1% chance? Bro, they literally have Ronaldo. The young man types in a $1,000 bet. It showed a potential payout of a million dollars.

But Cristiano Ronaldo actually plays for Portugal in the World Cup. Saudi Arabia was knocked out in the first round. That video is still up. That's all for today. Monday, July 6th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Neil Meta and Brenna Smith. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.