Crypto news

The decentralized event betting platform Polymarket has found itself at the center of a scandal. It turned out that the company deliberately paid content creators to produce staged videos showing supposedly winning bets on the service. The videos were actively distributed on social media and served as covert advertising.

Several dozen authors were involved in the scheme. An analysis of over 1,100 videos, as well as internal instructions and interviews with program participants, showed that bloggers were paid between $2,000 and $3,000 monthly. At the same time, contributors were required not to disclose the fact of commercial cooperation with the platform.

To create the illusion of real bets, fake copies of the Polymarket website were used. Screenshots were recorded and videos with fictitious winnings were filmed on them. A separate marketing agency was responsible for promoting these videos. From December to mid-May, 1,105 videos from 10 sponsored authors garnered over 140 million views.

One striking example is student George Makihara. In January, he published a video in which he "won" $100,000 on a bet that Donald Trump would publicly say the word McDonald's. According to estimates, from January to mid-May, Makihara showed 145 fictitious bets worth nearly $410,000 in his videos — none of these transactions actually existed.

After journalists began asking questions, many authors hastily deleted the compromising videos. Polymarket also eliminated the duplicate websites used to record the staged materials.

Cryptalist Analytics: This case undermines trust in prediction markets, which position themselves as objective tools for assessing probabilities. If a platform is willing to fabricate "success stories" to attract users, it calls into question the reliability of the entire ecosystem. Investors and traders should exercise increased caution: behind flashy videos with large winnings may lie a simple marketing trick, not real analytics.