Points of Focus

• The WSJ reported that Polymarket’s $1.9 million in influencer bets were fake and filmed on demo sites.
• Creators were paid up to $3,000/month without clear disclosure.
• The campaign targeted US users despite Polymarket’s regulatory restrictions.

A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) investigation found that Polymarket paid mostly college-age creators to stage fake winning bets on copycat versions of its website, with none of the $1.9 million in bets shown across 1,105 reviewed videos being real.

Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its platform, including dummy sites such as “poiymarket.com,” and instructed creators to film simulated trades there while concealing their paid relationship with the company. A marketing contractor called Virality was engaged to amplify the content, operating a social-media army that reposted the clips across platforms to manufacture organic-looking momentum.

🚨POLYMARKET: WSJ JUST EXPOSED A MASSIVE DECEPTIVE MARKETING OPERATION!!!

The Wall Street Journal investigation reveals Polymarket paid offshore creators to aggressively promote its international platform directly to Americans, despite being banned in the U.S.

They allegedly… pic.twitter.com/RwjT6DJppy

— Crypto Banter (@crypto_banter) June 21, 2026

One video showed a creator winning $100,000 after US President Donald Trump appeared to say the word “McDonald’s” in January. Trump never said the word that month, and the clip turned out to be older. Across 118 videos, creators collectively celebrated roughly $900,000 in fabricated wins. The same bets would have lost more than $166,000 on the actual market.

The mechanics of the operation

Creators said Polymarket provided bullet-point guidance on what to say, reviewed finished videos before publication, and requested a reshoot if a clip was not engaging enough or showed obvious signs of staging. They were instructed not to disclose payment. Creators started adding the label “@polymarket partner” to their bios only after the journal’s journalists began contacting them.

One creator who worked with Polymarket until March compared the practice to fast food commercials, framing the staged wins as an exaggerated but acceptable form of product advertising. The campaign specifically targeted American users who can reach the offshore site through a VPN, despite Polymarket being banned from serving US customers since the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a $1.4-million civil penalty order in January 2022.

A payments trail had already raised disclosure questions

The WSJ investigation did not arrive in isolation. Politico reported on June 5, 2026, that Polymarket’s chief marketing officer, Matthew Modabber, used a personal PayPal account to send at least $350,000 to influencers and content creators between January 2025 and February 2026, with more than $2.5 million sent to more than 800 recipients over that 14-month span.

The question of whether those payments were properly disclosed under US advertising rules had already been raised before the fake-win campaign became public.

The structural contradiction at the centre of the story

The deception is particularly pointed given Polymarket’s core product claim. Real Polymarket trades run on the Polygon blockchain and settle in USDC (USDC), with markets resolving through Universal Market Access (UMA)’s permissionless oracle, where any participant can propose or dispute an outcome by posting a $750 bond.

The platform’s entire value proposition rests on public verifiability. Its growth campaign relied on the precise opposite: trades executed on private dummy sites that no public ledger could confirm or deny.

Columbia Business School published a study in November 2025 finding significant artificially inflated trading activity on prediction markets, including Polymarket, adding academic weight to what the WSJ has now documented operationally.

Polymarket’s response and what comes next

Polymarket said it is committed to accurate, fair, and transparent markets and plans a comprehensive audit of active promotional content. The company did not concede the central allegations in the investigation.

The timing is consequential. Polymarket has pursued regulated US market entry and wants to bring its exchange onshore in direct competition with CFTC-licensed Kalshi, which logged $6.38 billion in weekly volume last week and crossed $100 billion in lifetime notional trading.

Regulators reviewing Polymarket’s onshore application are now doing so against the backdrop of a WSJ investigation into how the platform acquired the user base it is presenting as evidence of market demand.

Prediction market open interest reached a record $1.48 billion in the week ending June 15. 

Prediction market open interest — the sum of outstanding contracts that remain “open” in the market — has reached a record weekly high. It hit $1.48 billion in the week ending June 15, the second record-setting week in a row.

Unlike trading volume, which reflects daily activity,… pic.twitter.com/YhBzP1WQUs

— a16z crypto (@a16zcrypto) June 20, 2026

One of the two largest platforms in that market is now explaining how it got there.