Polymarket exposed: a paid factory of fake bets and staged winnings.
Dozens of content creators received monthly payments of $2,000–3,000 from Polymarket for producing videos showcasing non-existent bets and winnings on the platform. These materials were actively distributed on social media and served as covert advertising for the service. The scheme, uncovered during a journalistic investigation, covered over 1,100 videos published from December to mid-May.
The scale of the manipulation is impressive: 10 sponsored creators generated over 140 million views. To create the illusion of real transactions, lookalike websites—exact copies of the Polymarket interface—were used. Creators were strictly instructed not to disclose the fact of collaboration, making the advertising entirely native and misleading.
A striking example is student George Makihara. In January, he published a video where he supposedly won $100,000 by betting that Donald Trump would publicly say the word "McDonald’s." From January to mid-May, Makihara showed 145 fictitious bets in his videos totaling nearly $410,000. In reality, none of these transactions existed—it was pure staging.
After the investigation gained publicity, most creators deleted the compromised videos. Polymarket, in turn, shut down the lookalike websites used for recording the materials. However, the damage remains: trust in the platform, which positions itself as a tool for objective forecasting, has been undermined.
Analytical commentary: This incident is not just a reputational blow to Polymarket but a systemic problem for the entire prediction market. When a platform pays to create the illusion of successful bets, it undermines the fundamental principle on which trust in such services is built—transparency. Investors and users should be wary: if marketing is built on deception, what is the real liquidity and reliability of data on the platform itself?