Polymarket Staged $900K in Fake Winnings to Court Banned US Users, WSJ Finds

Polymarket paid a network of social-media creators to stage bets and winnings on near-perfect replicas of its website, a Wall Street Journal investigation found. This was part of a campaign aimed at U.S. users; the platform is legally barred from serving.

• Key Takeaways:
• • WSJ found Polymarket creators displayed nearly $900,000 in fabricated winnings across 118 videos.
• • The Journal reviewed 1,105 videos; about 70% showed bets, and none of them were real.
• • Polymarket paid creators $2-$3,000 a month and told them not to disclose it, WSJ says.

Bets that never happened

Polymarket paid mostly college-age social-media creators to stage bets, and sometimes winnings, on near-perfect replicas of its own website, according to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) investigation published over the weekend. The Journal reviewed more than 1,100 videos and found that roughly $1.9 million in displayed wagers were not real.

The campaign’s emblem was college student George Makihara, who in January posted a video showing a $100,000 win on a bet that President Trump would say “McDonald’s” that month. It was one of 145 wagers totaling nearly $410,000 that Makihara appeared to place between January and mid-May. None of them were real, WSJ reporters Katherine Long, Caitlin Ostroff, Neil Mehta, and Brenna T. Smith claim. On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made that same McDonald’s bet that month, per the Journal. All of them lost.

To stage the trades, the Journal found, Polymarket built lookalike copies of its own site – including one at “poiymarket.com” – and had creators wager on them instead of the real platform. Of the 1,105 videos reviewed, about 70% featured a bet, and in the 778 where a creator appeared to place one, all used the fake sites. Across 118 videos celebrating wins, creators displayed nearly $900,000 in fabricated winnings; placed for real, the Journal calculated, those positions would have lost more than $166,000.

The creators were paid roughly $2-$3,000 a month and were told not to disclose the arrangement; some added “@polymarket partner” to their bios only after Journal reporters started asking questions. The effort ran through a marketing contractor called Virality, which paid clippers only when at least 60% of their audience was in the U.S. and drew more than 140 million views across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, according to analytics firm Tubular cited by the Journal.

The campaign’s focus on U.S. audiences is of special note. Polymarket has been barred from offering its main exchange to Americans since a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, though U.S. users can still reach the offshore platform through a VPN. Commodities law bars deceptive marketing, and the CFTC has previously acted against firms that used simulated trades to sell their products. Yet ,the fabricated clips were aimed squarely at that audience, against a record the same investigation undercut: a separate Journal analysis found most Polymarket users lose money.

The campaign reached beyond anonymous clippers. Polymarket also struck a multimillion-dollar deal with streamer Adin Ross and promoted dozens of his videos, several of which discussed trading on inside information. These revelations come just a few weeks after a POLITICO investigation on June 5 found Polymarket’s chief marketing officer paid more than two dozen influencers at least $350,000 to talk up the platform on X, most without disclosing the arrangement.

Polymarket told the Journal it is “committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets” and that it would conduct a comprehensive audit of its active promotional content. The scrutiny lands as the platform pushes its exchange back onshore and chases record prediction-market volumes now running into the tens of billions monthly.

For a platform whose entire pitch is on-chain transparency – the idea that every trade is public and checkable against the ledger, and users don’t have to trust anyone – the growth campaign relied on wins that existed only in edited video, on sites no blockchain could verify. And from the perspective of users, the proof that these wins were fake was there the entire time. But it drew no real scrutiny until mainstream reporters came knocking.