Polymarket has been caught up in a scandal: staged bets and millions of fake views.
The event prediction platform Polymarket has found itself at the center of a high-profile investigation that uncovered a large-scale scheme to create fake content. It turned out that the company paid creators to produce videos showcasing non-existent bets and winnings on counterfeit copies of the site. These videos were actively distributed on social media as covert advertising.
My analysis shows that such practices undermine trust in prediction platforms. If users cannot distinguish real data from staged content, the entire concept of prediction markets loses its meaning. Here, we are seeing not just a marketing trick, but a systemic deception of the audience.
The Mechanism of Fake Marketing
Dozens of content creators were involved in the scheme. Creators were paid between $2,000 and $3,000 per month, while being strictly prohibited from disclosing the collaboration. For filming, clone websites of Polymarket were used, where screenshots and videos with fictitious transactions were created. A separate marketing agency was responsible for promoting these materials on social media.
Here are the key figures: 1,105 videos from 10 sponsored creators, published from December to mid-May, garnered over 140 million views. This is a massive reach that created a false impression of the platform's popularity and liquidity.
High-Profile Example: A Student with Fictitious $100,000
One of the scheme's participants, student George Makihara, released a video in January where he supposedly won $100,000 on a bet that Donald Trump would publicly say the word "McDonald’s." From January to mid-May, he "showed" 145 bets in videos totaling nearly $410,000 — all of these transactions were fake. After journalists began asking questions, many creators deleted such videos, and Polymarket shut down the clone websites used for recording.
Notably, analysts at Bubblemaps had previously identified 80 bets on the platform regarding U.S. military action against Iran with suspiciously high accuracy. This suggests that Polymarket's problems may run deeper than just dishonest advertising.
My expert opinion: For the crypto prediction market, this scandal is a warning sign. Platforms aiming for mass adoption cannot build their reputation on fakes. If Polymarket does not restore transparency, user trust will be irrevocably lost, and regulators will have yet another reason for strict measures.