Polymarket Paid Influencers to Post Fake Betting Videos
Prediction market platform Polymarket has been paying online creators to post videos showing them making big, profitable bets — bets that never actually happened, filmed on near-perfect replicas of the real website.
That's the finding of a Wall Street Journal investigation that analyzed more than 1,100 Polymarket videos and reviewed instructional materials the company provided to creators. The fake trades and fictional winnings were then amplified by what the investigation describes as a "social-media army" deployed through a marketing contractor.
The creators were told not to mention they were being paid by Polymarket. That changed only after journalists started asking questions — at which point creators began quietly adding "@polymarket partner" to their bios.
One creator, college student Razeen Khan, defended the practice by comparing it to fast food commercials. "We're depicting what actually happens," he said.
Polymarket said in a statement that it is "committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets" and plans to audit its promotional content.
Why This Is a Bigger Problem Than Typical Influencer Disclosure
Most influencer marketing scandals involve someone failing to disclose that they were paid to recommend a product. This one goes further — the product being promoted is a financial platform where real people make real bets with real money based on what they see other people doing.
That distinction matters legally and ethically. The Federal Trade Commission has required paid endorsements to be disclosed since 2009, and those rules were significantly strengthened in 2023 to cover exactly this kind of scenario — where a financial relationship between a brand and a creator isn't clearly communicated to viewers. Violating those disclosure rules can result in civil penalties of up to $50,120 per violation.
But beyond the FTC, there's a deeper issue. Prediction markets are explicitly built on the idea that aggregated public sentiment and real money on the line produces accurate forecasts. The whole value proposition is that people betting their own money creates more reliable signals than polls or punditry. When a platform floods social media with fake winning bets to make the platform look more profitable and exciting than it is, it potentially draws in real users who deposit real money based on a manufactured impression of how easy it is to win.
That starts to look less like a marketing strategy and more like the kind of conduct securities regulators pay attention to — specifically the practice of artificially creating the appearance of activity or profitability to attract investors or participants, which has drawn enforcement action in traditional financial markets for decades.
What Polymarket Actually Is
For anyone unfamiliar, Polymarket is one of the largest prediction market platforms in the world. Users bet real money — in cryptocurrency, typically USDC — on the outcome of real-world events ranging from elections and economic indicators to sports outcomes and news events.
The platform gained significant mainstream attention during the 2024 US presidential election when its markets consistently showed Donald Trump with a higher probability of winning than most traditional polls suggested — a fact Trump supporters cited heavily and that gave prediction markets a moment of serious credibility.
That credibility is now directly relevant to what the WSJ investigation found. Polymarket's reputation rests on the idea that its markets reflect genuine public conviction backed by financial stakes. Manufactured videos showing fake wins on a fake version of the website undercut exactly that premise — and if the platform knew about it and paid for it, that's a credibility problem that an internal audit is unlikely to fully resolve.
Polymarket has faced regulatory scrutiny before. The CFTC ordered the platform to pay a $1.4 million fine in 2022 and required it to block US users after finding it was operating an unregistered derivatives exchange. The platform subsequently moved its operations offshore. Whether this latest controversy draws fresh regulatory attention remains to be seen.
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