A Wall Street Journal investigation reveals that Polymarket paid creators to simulate winnings on counterfeit copies of its own site.
A Wall Street Journal investigation published on Saturday, June 21, revealed that Polymarket paid dozens of social media creators to film videos in which they simulated placing bets – and sometimes winning – on near-identical replicas of its own website. None of the wagers shown in the videos were real.
The WSJ analyzed 1,105 videos produced by 10 creators and published between December 2025 and mid-May 2026. In roughly 70% of the content, at least one bet appeared. The total value of the wagers shown amounted to approximately $1.9 million, but none of them were genuine. In a January video, college student George Makihara displayed a $100,000 win on a bet related to the word “McDonald’s” spoken by President Trump: the footage of Trump used in the video was from two months earlier, and all of the more than 50 real accounts that had placed the same bet had lost.
Polymarket built clone sites specifically for the shoots. In 118 videos, creators celebrated fake winnings totaling nearly $900,000: those bets, in reality, would have lost more than $166,000.
Creators were paid between $2,000 and $3,000 per month and instructed not to disclose the commercial arrangement. Some added “@polymarket partner” to their bios only after the WSJ had begun asking questions. The campaign was managed through an external marketing contractor and targeted specifically American users: the marketing firm Virality coordinated a network of paid “clippers” who were compensated only when at least 60% of their audience was based in the United States. The videos accumulated over 140 million views on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, according to data from analytics provider Tubular.
Polymarket’s engagement with the American audience is itself controversial: the platform has been banned from offering its prediction market service to Americans since 2022, following a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) reached during the Biden administration, although users can still access the site via VPN. Polymarket is currently seeking to reverse the effects of that settlement in order to bring its platform back onshore, and is aggressively expanding its offering with new markets on private company valuations and IPOs. In the meantime, Kentucky has filed suit against Polymarket alongside rival Kalshi this week, accusing both of operating sports betting without a license.
The fake bets are not the only instance of a lack of transparency in Polymarket’s marketing. On June 5, Politico reported that Chief Marketing Officer Matthew Modabber had used a personal PayPal account to pay creators who promoted Polymarket’s odds on X without labeling the posts as advertising. The account reportedly sent at least $350,000 to creators and influencers, while the total overall payments exceeded $2.5 million to more than 800 recipients. The WSJ further adds that streamer Adin Ross holds a multimillion-dollar deal with Polymarket, and that the platform paid creators to promote at least 19 videos on how to trade using insider information – a practice Polymarket claims to explicitly prohibit.
Polymarket told the WSJ it is “committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets” and announced it will conduct a full audit of its promotional content.
