Polymarket Scandal: Platform Paid Bloggers for Fake Bets and Wins
The decentralized prediction platform Polymarket has found itself at the center of a major scandal. It has been revealed that the company paid content creators to produce staged videos showcasing fake bets and winnings. These videos were actively distributed on social media as advertisements for the service.
The Scheme with Staged Videos and Clone Websites
Dozens of creators were involved in the scheme. An analysis of over 1,100 videos, as well as internal instructions and interviews with content makers, showed that bloggers were paid between $2,000 and $3,000 per month. They were strictly forbidden from disclosing their collaboration with the platform. Copies of the Polymarket website—specially created clones—were used for filming, where transactions were supposedly recorded.
A separate marketing agency handled the promotion of these videos. From December to mid-May, 1,105 videos from 10 sponsored creators garnered over 140 million views. One of the most striking examples is student George Makihara. In January, he released a video where he supposedly won $100,000 on a bet that Donald Trump would publicly say the word "McDonald’s." From January to mid-May, Makihara showcased 145 bets in his videos totaling nearly $410,000—in reality, these transactions did not exist.
Reaction and Consequences
After the information became public, many creators deleted the compromising videos. Polymarket also shut down the clone websites used to record the staged materials. The platform had previously come under scrutiny from analysts: in May, Bubblemaps experts discovered 80 bets on Polymarket regarding U.S. military actions against Iran with suspiciously high accuracy.
My expert opinion: This scandal undermines trust in prediction markets, which are positioned as tools for objective forecasting. If the platform is willing to fabricate content to attract users, a natural question arises: how honest are the trades and algorithms within the system itself? For investors, this is a troubling signal—the transparency of the platform you trade on must be absolute.