The WSJ On Polymarket's Questionable Ads

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2:26Today I am joined by two incredible reporters from the Wall Street Journal, Catherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, who just published an incredible and truly horrible story about Polymarket and their extremely questionable influencer marketing campaigns. Catherine, Caitlin, thanks for joining me. So happy to be here. Thanks for having us, Ed. Okay, so walk me through exactly what Polymarket was doing with these influencers and social media. What were they paying for? What was the end result? So the end result was an onslaught of videos that appeared to show college age social media creators betting and winning large amounts of money online.

3:05But what we found is that all of those bets were actually fake. They were placed on a dummy platform that Polymarket built to almost exactly but not precisely resemble the website. And some of the wins that the influencers showed themselves having were faked as well. The creators were using things like outdated footage or altered headlines to suggest that they won really lucrative bets when in fact they would have lost. Right. So just to be clear, so the bets were fake, the website was fake, but also the bets would have lost. A lot of them would have. Not every single one, but the majority of the videos where bets were placed would have actually lost in real life, but they were depicted as winning.

3:54That's truly awful. I thought Polymarket was illegal in America as well. You would be right about that. Polymarket entered a settlement with federal regulators back in 2022, in which they agreed to stop offering their platform to U.S. traders. but as anybody who's used a VPN knows, it's pretty trivial to get around things like that kind of geofencing. Anybody with a VPN has been able to access Polymarket, even if they're based in the US or other countries where Polymarket is banned. And so these influencers, they're American-based, right? So it's a mix. Some are based in Canada, some are based in the US, and then there's likely creators in other jurisdictions as well, but that was one of the mix that we looked at in our corpus.

4:42And so it looks like here is about 1100 videos you went over. So that's truly, it's truly a massive scale operation, but do you think it's bigger than the ones you saw or is it just like, did you get any idea of the total scale? Yeah. So we reviewed 1100 videos that had been posted between late December, Correct me if I'm wrong, Caitlin. Was it late December or late November? Late last year. Late 2025, by all accounts. Late 2025 and mid-May of this year. So 1 ,100 videos, 10 creators. My impression and belief from my reporting and Caitlin's reporting and the reporting of our other colleagues is that this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Polymarkets marketing operation.

5:26We identified dozens of other creators who were posting videos in similar formats. um we didn't scrape their videos uh but um we thought our sample size was sufficient that's crazy so walk me through the exact stage so you have a video of a guy based guessing whether trump will say inshallah i think was one of probably not in your but like trump will say burger or something and then they're staring at the tv and then they go oh he said burger but the website they were making the bet on was just completely fake? Yes. So in these videos, when you watch them, you will often see a college age student kind of go in with like this hook phrase where they'll say, for what?

6:14Or wait, what? And then they will be like, oh, I can bet on this market. And they'll depict the market. And then sometimes it will show essentially what the outcome is of that market. They'll cut to video of Trump saying a certain word or phrase, and then they'll jump up and down and sort of give the impression that they've won. And this is targeting children. So college age, kids, it's explicitly targeting young people. Well, I wouldn't go that far as to say it's explicitly targeting young people. But what we do know about who it's targeting is that it is targeting Americans. We looked at poly markets, instructions to people who were paid to boost the reach of this campaign online.

7:02A third-party contractor that Polymarket worked with to help manage the campaign said, we'll only pay you if at least 60 % of your audience is based in the United States. And then, as to the point you alluded to, yes, the creators who are making these videos, they are college-aged, college students, people in their early to mid-20s, certainly. Jesus It feels like introducing children to gambling On some level I mean maybe you can't say that But I'm certain I mean it seems like showing young people Doing something and saying You can get bread Which is a young person's way of referring to money For the old heads listening I knew that one I'm not that old But it just it feels quite dystopian Is kind of what I'm getting at It certainly is marketed To give the impression that this is a way to make money off of what you know.

7:54So the majority of the bets that we looked at, they showed a trade being placed. Most didn't show an outcome, but for those that did, almost all of them, it was someone winning. I think there was like, what, four or five, Catherine, in the group that we looked at where someone was depicted as losing their bet. So the overarching message was you can make money. I kind of find it fascinating that there's one where they lost. Anyway, keep going. Yeah, I was just going to chime in and add that, you know, in addition to the creators showing themselves appearing to win money, they also implied that they were wealthy in other ways, including by showing account balances on this dummy website where, again, no real money was being traded.

8:42These balances were fictitious. But the videos showed their account balances on Polymarket in the tens of thousands of dollars. Some even had balances over$100 ,000. And one of the creators whose videos we reviewed, she shows herself placing bets from a San Francisco bedroom. And then she'll have a video where she's showing herself dancing on a beach in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. And she says, Polymarket Funds My Life. And there's a Hello Kitty sticker in the corner that says, I am unemployed. So the impression is certainly that these people are making enough money off of Polymarket to support themselves and support themselves in fairly high style.

9:23And it sounds like a real operation here, in the sense that they're building functional dummy websites. As we speak, I have the animated gifs from the piece up, and these seem quite intricate. Perhaps they're Vibecode and it doesn't really matter because no payment rails are in there, but these seem like they are built to look identical. They are extremely convincing. Catherine and I and our colleagues were looking at these for about two weeks before our colleague Neil Mehta realized that this is not Polymarket. We started off firmly believing that this was Polymarket. Right. When you say that, so this is the P-O-I-Y market website.

10:08When you say you believed it was Polymarket, what did you think the purpose was when you found it? We thought these were just videos that people were making, showing themselves, placing actual trades on Polymarket. I don't think we had a theory at the onset as to why they were doing this. but we came across a bunch of these videos and we were curious to understand, you know, what was happening, like who these people were, how they were making money. And so we have this database of all of the Polymarket trades that we had been building over the past several months. And we started off trying to trace these trades.

10:46We wanted to understand, you know, what bets were happening, who was making these. And we went to go about finding those because all of Polymarket's data is public. And we very quickly realized that we could not figure out, like we couldn't place these trades. We could not find the actual trades shown in the video. And it took us a minute to realize that this was not actually happening on Polymarket. And the red flag for that ended up being that website, P-O-I-Y Market, which our colleague Neil Mehta saw and flagged to us. Hell yeah. Good work, Neil. Great work, Neil. Yeah, major shout out to Neil.

11:26Here's the thing, though. So wait, maybe I'm just misunderstanding this. So not only did some of the trades never exist, like it was never possible to bet on that particular outcome? All of the markets that we saw did exist. Oh, okay. And that's one of the reasons why it took us so long to understand that we were looking at a fake website. I mean, we were combing through this database. Caitlin has been painstakingly building over months of every single trade on Polymarket, which, you know, is accessible to us because Polymarket is a blockchain-based system. So everything is public. And, you know, we're looking for these trades that appear to have taken place, right?

12:08We saw a video of it taking place and it just didn't seem to exist in this database. And at that point, we, you know, thanks to Neil's eagle eyes, showing that, you know, one of these creators had seemingly made a mistake and accidentally left the URL of this fake site, Poi Market, P-O-I-Y Market, yeah, that Polly Market had built in his video. And it was only because of that clue that we started being able to unravel that all of these videos that we were looking at were actually being placed on fake websites, which, as we've mentioned, the fake websites were almost identical to the real poly market.

12:48But, you know, once we started looking for some more of these clues, once we knew that the website was fake, we were able to distinguish various ways in which to tell the fake website from the real website.

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14:10Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Ear Say, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary. Massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. and what happens when you wake up alone very far from earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.

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15:48So, was it just PoyMarket, or were there multiple other fake websites as well? I mean, once we started looking for other simulated Polymarket websites, we did find a couple of others. But I think all of the ones that we were able to identify specifically what the website was, was Polymarket. There was one other where it was like this developer link that appeared in a handful of videos where it was like one of the like Polymarket developers dot like their name dot dev dot Polymarket dot dev. And so it was like this internal development site that appeared in a couple of the videos that also seemed like it was being used.

16:33So we weren't always certain like which simulated platform the trade was happening on in part because we heard from creators, part of the instruction that they got in making these videos was to not make it obvious that it was on a simulated website. So if you were on a P-O-I-Y market, you might uppercase the I to make it appear like Polly market. And so we came across a handful of these, but I don't think we are exactly certain of how much each one was used. It's so strange. How is this not illegal? I mean, I guess if the website itself is illegal, then illegally advertising the illegal website is kind of just doubling down at that point.

17:17It doesn't really matter. Has the government – I saw that there was some sort of federal inquiry into Polymarket. Was it related to this story? We are not sure of the precise parameters or subject of the federal inquiry. You're referring, I assume, to CFTC investigation that we reported on last week. Yeah, the contours of that investigation are as yet unclear. You know, I know that it is ongoing and extensive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. You know, I should add as well that the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency conducting this investigation, a spokesperson for that agency declined to comment on the existence of an investigation citing HTC policy.

18:02Yeah, it's just so strange because I don't think I've seen anything like this in tech outside of crypto, which I know is, I know that crypto is kind of, I think Polymarket is a crypto product, right? Or it's a blockchain one? Yeah, it is. They moved on from that crap. Crap referring to a comment that I'm making, not the journalist in question. No, Polymarket is a crypto, it's on crypto rails, as they would say. Yes. That's so strange. What differentiates this from Kalshi? Because I basically consider them the same website at this point, but I guess they're different somehow. So again, our social media feeds are just full with videos for different platforms.

18:48We came across the Polymarket videos of them placing these trades. We've certainly come across a lot of videos of, you know, people promoting Kalshi, but we haven't come across anything similar in the sense of, you know, Polymarket was, you know, telling people, use the simulated website, create these bets and do not disclose that you have any affiliation. We are always looking to see what we might be missing in coverage of the space. But, you know, Now, Kalshi is, I guess, one difference between it and Polymarket is also that it is regulated by CFTC. Polymarket has a new U.S. product launched late last year that is CFTC regulated, but the broader platform is still offshore.

19:37So, you know, we try to look to see what we might be missing in this space. But the Polymarket videos kind of stuck out to us as we were going through our own social media feeds, just trying to understand, you know, why we were getting so many of these. what was behind that. And we did not expect it to lead to these simulated vets. So are your algorithms, but so did you do this on your own phones or like a journal approved one? Because I'm wondering, are your algorithms ruined now? Oh yeah. My algorithm is cooked. It's just like 18 year old Zin kids telling you to gamble on the future. Always see our prediction markets.

20:17I see no other content at this point. that must be awful it's great for keeping track of things it's probably not great for our long term mental health yeah this is why you've just got to look at like lifting videos and palace cats that's how I get around this you just need to cleanse your feet every so often but on a legal level just like on a thing what differentiates cat like you said that polymarket has a US approved product is like is that a prediction market is it something different And why is Calci able to operate legally, but not Polymarket? Yeah. So zooming out here a bit, right? So Calci, Polymarket's biggest competitor, Calci and Polymarket, they're both prediction markets.

21:04The biggest distinction between the two is that Calci made a huge bet that it could successfully achieve US regulated status. And Polymarket, conversely, decided that it was okay operating offshore as an unregistered crypto entity that, you know, people can access if they have a VPN, but, you know, they're not technically supposed to. So Calci has not necessarily played nice with regulators. You know, it had a pretty significant legal battle early in its career over whether election markets would be allowed on the platform. But it did have success. It won that battle. And now Kelshi is a US regulated prediction market, which it says is legally available in all 50 states, although there's currently some commotion over Nevada, which...

21:56I mean, as a Vegas resident, you can't take our beautiful gambling away from Vegas residents. Exactly. So as one might suspect, the gambling industry is extremely worried about the rise of prediction markets. You know, unlike online sportsbooks or in-person gambling, CalSHI and other U.S. regulated prediction markets have successfully up till now made the argument that they are federally regulated. That means that states cannot restrict their operations. So state gambling commissions can't impose conditions on how they operate. They also can't levy taxes on prediction markets. So CalSHE has fairly successfully been playing within this federal regulatory structure.

22:47Polymarket has been playing outside of it. And for a while, the two platforms seem to be growing sort of in lockstep. Polymarket started out with a bit of a lead. It got a huge amount of traction after the 2024 presidential election, which it successfully called for Donald Trump. Calci was a bit more – it was a lesser-known quantity at the time. It had less name recognition. But starting around late 2025, Calci actually started to eek ahead of Polymarket when it comes to a relative share of trading volume on prediction markets. And as of last month, Kalshi was doing insanely more volume than Polymarket on Polymarket's offshore and US app combined.

23:31Do you know what those volumes might be? Roughly? Are we talking 10 million? I would have to go back and look at the data. I'd love to consult a chart in our story. It was, for the month of May, twice the amount of volume, almost twice, sorry, the amount of volume on Kalshi versus Polymarket. that's really worrying I mean so looking this up it looks like 17 billion dollars in the month of May alone we live in a godless society this is a statement I am saying not the journalist in question it's very worrying I find this whole thing quite worrying not just the gambling but the financialization of everything I don't think it's good to gamble on every outcome personally and I worry I worry about this spreading personally and it feels like it needs regulation in an extreme way that basically doesn't exist yet.

24:27I mean, I can talk a little bit about my own experiences here.

24:34Caitlin's been covering this space a lot longer than I have. I sort of jumped into it at the beginning of this year. And as part of the process of growing familiar with how prediction markets operate, I decided to watch the State of the Union through the lens of a prediction market live streamer who was live streaming the State of the Union and talking about the bets that he was placing on what President Trump would say during that speech. And, you know, I think similar to watching live sports on which you've wagered, it was simultaneously more exciting and And I think also slightly concerning the way that instead of sort of listening for the content of the speech, it very rapidly for me turned into something closer to a game of sort of wondering what the next word is, like what is he going to say?

25:31And will it hit? Like, will the bet hit? And so I understand where the concerns that you're describing emanate from, certainly. I would say also that, you know, there's a lot of people who point to prediction markets as an extremely, extremely legitimate financial tool and one that institutions can increasingly take advantage of.

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26:53Visit Moto.us for more details. Download the Moto Casino app today. Must be 21 plus. Moto Casino. American Social Casino. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn, host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with divergent author Veronica Roth to talk about her sprawling new novel, Seek the Traitor's Son. It's a sci-fi fantasy epic about two protagonists on opposite sides of a war and a prophecy neither of them wanted. My first book was Divergent. And when that came out, like, because it was so popular, I think it attracted, like, mostly positivity, but the negativity I sucked in like a sponge.