Polymarket, the prediction market platform, paid influencers to advertise fake gambling wins to their followers.
A Wall Street Journal investigation reviewed more than a thousand TikTok videos from 10 creators promoting Polymarket. Half showed footage of losing bets while the creators talked about winning payouts. More than half featured platforms that weren't Polymarket at all. In total, those creators promoted roughly $900,000 in fictional winnings — bets that would have actually lost the creators more than $166,000. Polymarket allegedly used a hiring firm and a network of social media accounts to spread the ads.
Prediction markets are in an aggressive land-grab for mainstream users right now. Polymarket and rival Kalshi have both signed celebrity ambassadors — Timothée Chalamet and Lionel Messi among them — to front big campaigns. Faking wins to lure in retail bettors isn't a minor compliance slip; it's a direct attack on the informed-consent premise that prediction markets use to argue they're different from gambling.
Shortly after the Journal published its findings, Polymarket announced an internal audit of its advertising arm, promising to review compliance with legal and disclosure requirements. That the audit came hours after the story broke, and not before a thousand deceptive videos went live, tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously the company was taking its own standards.