The WSJ On Polymarket's Questionable Ads

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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am of course your host Ed Zitron. Better Offline Today I am joined by two incredible reporters from the Wall Street Journal, Katherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff, who just published an incredible and truly horrible story about Polymarket and their extremely questionable influencer marketing campaigns. Katherine Caitlin, thanks for joining me.

2:10

So happy to be here. Thanks for having us Ed.

2:41

Okay, so walk me through exactly what Polymarket was doing with these influencers on social media. Like what were they paying for? What was the end result?

2:44

So the end result was an onslaught of videos that appeared to show college age social media creators betting and winning large amounts of money online. But what we found is that all of those bets were actually fake. They were placed on a dummy platform that Polymarket built to almost exactly, but not, not precisely resemble the website. And some of the wins that the influencers showed themselves having were faked as well. The creators were using things like outdated footage or altered headlines to suggest that they won really lucrative bets, when in fact they would have lost.

2:54

Right. So just, just to be clear, so the bets were fake, the website was fake, but also the bets would have lost.

3:35

A lot of them would have. Not every single one. But the majority of the videos where bets were placed would have actually lost in real life, but they were depicted as winning.

3:43

That's truly awful. I thought Polymarket was illegal in America as well.

3:55

You would be right about that. Polymarket entered a settlement with federal regulators back in 2022 in which they agreed to stop offering their platform to US Traders. But as anybody who's used a VPN knows, it's pretty trivial to get around things like, like that kind of geofencing. Anybody with a VPN has been able to access Polymarket, even if they're based in the US or other countries where polymarket is banned.

4:00

And so these influencers, they're American based, Right?

4:26

So it's a mix. Some are based in Canada, some are based in the U.S. and then there's likely creators in other jurisdictions as well. But that was one of the mix that we looked at in our corpus.

4:30

And so it looks like Here is about 1100 videos you went over. So that's truly, it's truly a massive scale operation. But do you think it's bigger than the ones you saw or is it just like. Did you get any idea of the total scale?

4:42

Yeah. So we reviewed 1100 videos that had been posted between late December. Correct me if I'm wrong, Caitlin, was it December, late November? Late Last year? Late 2025? By all accounts, late 2025 and mid May of this year. So 1100 videos. 10. My impression and belief from my reporting and Caitlin's reporting and the reporting of our other colleagues is that this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Polymarket's marketing operation. We identified dozens of other creators who were posting videos in similar formats. We didn't scrape their videos, but we thought our sample size was sufficient.

4:58

That's crazy.

5:37

So walk me through the exact stage. So you have a video of a guy based on guessing whether Trump will say Inshallah, I think was one of. Probably not in your. But like Trump will say burger or something and then they're staring at the TV and then they go, oh, he said burger. But the website they were making the bet on was just completely fake.

5:38

Yes, just completely fake. Yeah, so. So, yeah. So the in, in these videos, when you watch them, you will often see a college age student kind of go in with like this hook phrase where they'll say, throw what? Or wait what? And then they will be like, oh, I can, like, I can bet on this market. And they'll depict the market and then sometimes it will show essentially what the outcome is of that market. They'll cut to video of Trump saying a certain word or phrase and then they'll jump up and down and sort of give the impression that they've won.

6:00

And this is targeting children. So college age kids, like that it's explicitly targeting young people.

6:36

Well, I wouldn't go that far as to say it's explicitly targeting on people. But what we do know about who it's targeting is that it is targeting Americans. We looked at Polymarket's instructions to people who were paid to boost the reach of this campaign online. A third party contractor that Polymarket worked with to help manage the campaign said, we'll only pay you if at least 60% of your audience is based in the United States. And then to, you know, as to the point you alluded to, yes, the creators who are making these videos, they are college aged college students, people in their early to mid twenties.

6:43

Certainly Jesus feels like introducing children to gambling on some level. I mean, maybe you can't say that, but I'm certain. I mean, it seems like showing young people doing something and saying, you can get bread, which is a young person's way of referring to money for the old heads listening. I knew that one. I'm not that old, but it just, it feels quite dystopian is kind of what I'm getting at.

7:21

It certainly is marketed to give the impression that this is a way to make money off of what you know. So the majority of the bets that we looked at, you know, they showed a trade being placed. Most didn't show an outcome. But for those that did, you know, almost all of them, it was someone winning. I think there was like what, four or five Catherine in the group that we looked at where someone was depicted as losing their bet. So the overarching message was you can make, make money.

7:47

I kind of find it fascinating that there's one where they lost. But anyway, Keep going.

8:17

Yeah, I was. I was just going to chime in and add that, you know, in addition to the creators showing themselves appearing to win money, they also implied that they were wealthy in other ways, including by showing account balances on this dummy website where, again, no real money was being traded. These balances were fictitious, but the video showed their account balances on polymarket in the tens of thousands of dollars. Some even had balances over $100,000. And one of the creators whose videos we reviewed, she shows herself placing bets from a San Francisco bedroom. And then she'll have a video where she. She's showing herself dancing on a. On a beach in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, and she says, poly Market funds my life. And there's a hello Kitty sticker in the corner that says, I am unemployed. So the impression is certainly that people are making enough money off of polymarket to support themselves and support themselves in fairly high style.

8:22

And it sounds like kind of like a real operation here, like in the sense that there is like they're building functional dummy websites. Because looking as we speak, I have the animated gifs from the piece up, and it's. These seem quite intricate. These. Perhaps they're vibe code and it doesn't really matter because no payment rails are in there. But these seem like they are built to look identical.

9:23

They are extremely convincing. Catherine and I and our colleagues were looking at these for about two weeks before our colleague Neil Mehta realized that, like, this is not Poly Market. Like, we started off firmly believing that this was Poly Market. Right.

9:47

Well, when you say that. So this is the poiy Market website, when you say it, believe you believed it was polymarket. What did you think the purpose was when you found that?

10:03

We thought these were just videos that people were making showing themselves, placing actual trades on polymarket. I don't think we had a theory at the onset as to why they were doing this, but we came across a bunch of these videos and we were curious to understand what was happening, who these people were, how they were making money. And so we have this database of all of the Poly Market trades that we had been building over the past several months. And we started off trying to trace these trades. We wanted to understand what bets were happening, who was making these, and we want to go about finding those because all of polymarket's data is public. And we very quickly realized that we could not figure out, we couldn't place these trades. We could not find the actual trades shown in the video. And it took us a minute to realize that this was not actually happening on polymarket. And the red flag for that ended up being that website, P O I Y Market, which our colleague Neil Mehta saw and flagged to us.

10:15

Hell yeah. Good work, Neil.

11:21

Great work, Neil.

11:24

Yeah, major shout out to Neil.

11:24

Here's the thing though, so wait, maybe I'm just misunderstanding this. So not only did the trades, did some of the trades never exist? Like it was never possible to bet on that particular outcome.

11:26

All of the markets that we saw did exist. And that's one of the reasons why it took us so long to understand that we were looking at a fake website. I mean, we were combing through this database Caitlin has been painstakingly building over months of every single trade on Polymarket, which, you know, is accessible to us because polymarket is a, is a blockchain based system. So everything is public. And, you know, we're looking for these trades that appear to have taken place. Right. We saw a video of it taking place and it just didn't seem to exist in this database. And at that point we, you know, thanks to Neil's eagle eyes showing that, you know, one of these creators had seemingly made a mistake and accidentally left the URL of this fake site. POI Market. P O I Y Market. Yeah, that polymarket had built in his video. And it was only because of that clue that, that we started being able to unravel that all of these videos that we were looking at were actually being placed on fake websites, which, as we've mentioned, the fake websites were almost identical to the real Poly Market. But once we started looking for some more of these clues, once we knew that the website was fake, we were able to distinguish various ways in which to tell the fake website from the real website.

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16:17

So was that, Was it just poi market or were there like multiple other fake websites as well?

16:24

I mean, once we started looking for other simulated polymarket websites, we did find a couple of others, but I think all of the ones that we were able to identify specifically what the website was, was polymarket. There was one other, where it was this developer link that appeared in a handful of videos where it was like one of the polymarket developers, their name.dev.polymarket.de and so it was like this internal development site that appeared in a couple of the videos that also seemed like it was being used. So we weren't always certain which simulated platform the trade was happening on, in part because we heard from creators, part of the instruction that they got in making these videos was to not make it obvious that it was on a simulated website. So if you were on a poiy market, you might uppercase the I to make it appear like Poly Market. And so we came across a handful of these, but I don't think we are exactly certain of how much each one was used.

16:30

It's so strange. How is this not illegal? I mean, I guess if the website itself is illegal, then illegally advertising the illegal website is kind of just kind of doubling down at that point. Doesn't really matter. Like, has the government. I saw that there was some sort of federal inquiry into polymarket. Was it related to this story?

17:43

We are not sure of the precise parameters or subject of the federal inquiry. You're referring, I assume, to CFTC investigation that we reported on last week. Yeah, the. The contours of that investigation are as yet unclear. You know, I know that it is ongoing and extensive according to a person familiar with the investigation. You know, I add as well that the, the cftc, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency conducting this investigation. A spokesperson for that agency declined to comment on the existence of an investigation, citing HC policy.

18:02

Yeah, that. It's just so strange because I've. I don't think I've seen anything like this in tech outside of crypto, which I know is. I know that crypto is kind of the. Is. I think Polymarket is a crypto product.

18:38

Right?

18:51

Or it's a blockchain one.

18:51

Yeah, it is.

18:52

They moved on from that crap. That crap referring to a comment that I'm making, not the Journalist in question.

18:53

No, it is a crypto. Is a crypto. It's on crypto rails, as they would say.

18:59

Yes, that's so strange. What differentiates this from Kalshi? Because I basically consider them the same website at this point, but I guess they're different somehow.

19:05

So we like again, our social media feeds are just full with videos for different platforms. We came across the Polymarket videos of them placing these trades. We've certainly come across a lot of videos of people promoting Kalshi, but we haven't come across anything similar in the sense of Polymarket was telling people, use the simulated website, create these bets and do not disclose that you have any affiliation. We are always looking to see what we might be missing in coverage of the space. But Kalshi is, I guess one difference between it and Polymarket is also that it is regulated by cftc. Polymarket has a new US product launched late last year that is CFTC regulated, but the broader platform is still offshore. So we try to look to see what we might be missing in this space, but the Polymarket videos kind of stuck out to us as we were going through our own social media feeds, just trying to understand why we were getting so many of these, what was behind that and we did not expect it to lead to these simulated bets.

19:16

So are your algorithms. So did you do this on your own phones or like a journal approved one? Because I'm wondering, are your algorithms ruined now?

20:33

Oh yeah, my algorithm's cooked.

20:42

Yeah, it's just like 18 year old Zinn kids telling you to gamble on the future.

20:44

Always see our prediction markets. I see no other content at this point.

20:51

Yeah, that must be awful.

20:56

I mean it's great for keeping track of things. It's probably not good for our long term mental health.

20:59

Yeah, this is why you've just got to look at lifting videos and palace cats. That's how I get around this. Just like you just need to cleanse your feet every so often. But on a legal level, just like, like on a thing, what differentiates? Like you said that Polymarket has a US approved product is like, is that a prediction market? Is it something different? And why is Kalshi able to operate legally but not Polymarket?

21:05

Yeah, so taking a zooming out here a bit. Right, so Kelshi Polymarket's biggest competitor. Kelshi and Polymarket, they're both prediction markets. The biggest distinction between the two is that Kalshi Kalshi made a huge bet that it could successfully achieve U.S. regulated status and Polymarket conversely decided that it was okay operating offshore as an unregistered crypto entity that people can access if they have a vpn, but they're not technically supposed to. So Kalshi has not necessarily played nice with regulators. It had a pretty significant legal battle early in its career over whether election market would be allowed on the platform. But it did have success. It won that battle. And now Kelshi is a US regulated prediction market which it says is legally available in all 50 states. Although there's currently some commotion over Nevada

21:30

which I mean, as a Vegas resident, you can't take our beautiful gambling away from Vegas residents.

22:31

Exactly. So as one might might suspect, the, the gambling industry is extremely worried about the rise of prediction markets. You know, unlike online sports books or in person gambling, Kalshi and and other US regulated prediction markets have successfully up till now made the argument that they are federally regulated. That means that states cannot restrict their operations. So state gambling commissions can't say, can't impose conditions on how they operate. They also can't levy taxes on prediction markets. So Kalshi has fairly successfully been playing within this federal regulatory structure. Polymarket has been playing outside of it. And for a while the two platforms seem to be growing sort of in lockstep. You know, Polymarket started out with a

22:39

bit of a lead.

23:33

It got a huge amount of traction after the 2024 presidential election which it successfully called for Donald Trump. Kalshi was a bit of a bit more. It was a lesser known quantity at the time. It had less name recognition. But Starting around late 2025, Kalshi actually started to eke ahead of Polymarket when it comes to a relative share of trading volume on prediction markets. And as of last month, Kalshi was doing insanely more volume than Polymarket on Polymarkets, offshore and US app combined.

23:33

Do you know what those volumes might be roughly? Are we talking 10 times?

24:08

I would have to go back and

24:14

look at the data, consult a chart.

24:15

In our story, it was for the month of May, twice the amount of volume, Almost twice the amount of volume on Kalshi versus Polymarket.

24:17

That's really worrying. I mean, I think so. Looking this up, it looks like $17 billion in the month of May alone. We live in a godless society. It's a statement I am saying, not the journalists in question. It's very worrying. I find this whole thing quite worrying. Not just the gambling, but the financialization of everything. I don't think it's good to gamble on every outcome personally. And I worry, I worry about this spreading personally, and I don't like it feels like it needs regulation in an extreme way that basically doesn't exist yet.

24:28

I mean, I can talk a little bit about my own experiences here. I started covering Caitlin's been covering this space a lot longer than I have. I sort of jumped into it at the beginning of this year and as part of the process of growing familiar with how prediction markets operate, I decided to watch the State of the Union through the lens of a prediction market live streamer who was live streaming the State of the Union and talking about the bets that he was placing on what President Trump would say during during that speech. And you know, I think similar to watching live sports on which you have wagered, it was simultaneously more exciting. And I think also slightly concerning the way that instead of sort of listening for the content of the speech, it very rapidly for me turned into something closer to a game of sort of wondering what the next word is, like what is he going to say and will it hit? Like will the bet hit? And so I understand where the concerns that you're describing emanate from. Certainly I would say also that there's a lot of people who point to prediction markets as an extremely legitimate financial tool and one that institutions can increasingly take advantage of.

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29:21

I mean the only people I think they're taking the I think the only advantage being taken is of the customers because I have to wonder how many people win and it probably isn't very much. And the fact that they have to resort to the fact they have to resort to this kind of marketing suggests that the wins are not quite as common as they want you to believe.

30:20

Well, and that's one of a previous story that Catherine and I worked on together Basically analyzed just that, how many people actually win on prediction markets. And what we found was that about 70% of people who had traded on polymarket lost money. And losers to winners on Kalshi was about 2.9 to 1. And so while a lot of the marketing is centered around these are prediction markets where you can win money, in reality, most people do not win money.

30:38

Kind of feels like the DraftKings stuff as well. The sports scam claim where it's like, oh, yeah, of course it's really easy to. And this is not a statement I align with. It's easy, you just bet on what the winning team will be. But the existence of spreads and also the existence of the weird nomenclature that the prediction markets use is how they get you. Like I remember with. I was talking about with Nick devore and Rebecca Ungarino from Barons, and it was just like, yeah, the wording around Kaminay's potential death. And then they just pulled the entire thing, screwed a bunch of people over. And how they design and they say what a win is seems to also undermine people.

31:11

Right. And we've previously reported that the wording for pretty much all of these prediction markets really matters. And so there's been a lot of people who've reached out to us as journalists and said, I put money on this market, understanding that this is how it was structured and then the resolution was entirely unexpected or I don't think that it was a proper resolution. And so especially for some of these markets where it's not really a finite outcome or the rules might be written in a way where there's potential for different interpretation, there really is a risk of the market not going how people who are betting understand it might.

31:52

Or maybe people can't even see the rules. The rules are difficult to access in the first place. That was the case of somebody we profiled for our last story who wagered everything he had earned so far on prediction markets and ended up losing it all and is now living in a homeless shelter.

32:34

Classic gambler stuff as well. I mean, it's even in Vegas. So I live in Vegas. And you walk around and even there in like the gambling hub of everywhere, the airport is full of the. Hey, if you've got a gambling problem, call this number. Hey, gambling problems are scary. Gambling problem. Gambling problem next to a slot machine, of course. But it doesn't feel like, probably due to a lack of regulatory oversight, that there's the same alarm concern thought from the people making these markets. Do they seem. Have you heard anything from them about concerns related to gambling addiction or anything like that.

32:51

So Kelshi fairly recently did add some language related to gambling addiction on its homepage. It gave people the option to exclude themselves from the website, which is another common feature that many gambling apps have.

33:27

What does it, what does that mean?

33:45

Self exclusion is if somebody feels that they have a gambling problem, they can ask to be banned from, from the website, from the gambling app, from the casino. It's sort of, you know, it's not really a nuclear option, but it's a tool that people who are managing a gambling addiction can use if they feel like they're. Their gambling has gotten out of hand. You know, I think that these platforms, they don't conceive of themselves as gambling, they conceive of themselves as trading. This is, you know, in their minds more akin to day trading or, you know, trading in currencies than it is to gambling.

33:47

Question. So this is, hopefully this is a no, but I know when I had Arif Hassan and Caleb Wilson on talking about sports gambling a few months ago, apparently DraftKings and the like. So that was last year year. DraftKings and the like, they have an account manager that will actually work with significant bettors. Do you know if such a thing exists with calcium polymarket? Do they have high rollers that they covet? Is that something, I don't even mean influencers?

34:20

I don't know the answer to this.

34:46

I hope the answer is no.

34:48

That's not something that I have heard about. You know, what I can say from our own reporting is that both platforms seem intent on recruiting college students. And polymarket in particular has set up relationships with college clubs, fraternities offering them payments in exchange for signing their classmates up to the site. So I would say it's.

34:51

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Tell me more about that.

35:14

What?

35:16

This was a story that I reported with colleagues, including my colleague Kevin Dugan back in, I believe it was March. It was about both platforms, effort, efforts to sign up college students and you know, some, some great reporting that Kevin brought to the story was about Polymarket's efforts to recruit students at Columbia University. And they signed this partnership with a fraternity at Columbia. And in exchange for every student that members of that fraternity signed up, the fraternity got some money. And at the end of it there was a big sort of Poly market funded party. The fraternity got a plaque that said, you know, that they were the first member of the polymarket pledge class. And a lawsuit that was filed last week made similar allegations pertaining to polymarker's activities on other Campuses.

35:19

Have you heard about anything else like that with Kalshi perhaps? Or is it just. Were those the only events?

36:11

Kalshi had some much smaller, much less well funded partnership with campus groups. I would say polymarket is the prime mover in that space when it comes

36:17

to recruiting college students, getting kids into gambling. That's my statement. This is all truly horrible.

36:31

Have you.

36:39

So the one thing as we wrap up here, one thing that I keep coming back to is are there not guidelines around truth in advertising that these crossover with?

36:39

Yeah, so the Federal Trade Commission, which governs advertising, does have rules that require that advertisements be truthful and accurate. And then the CFTC also requires that marketing and that information not be deceptive. So there are laws from at least two federal regulators that do touch on how prediction markets market themselves to the

36:52

public,

37:21

but they don't appear to. I just, I keep thinking about these videos and I've had the animated GIF just in the corner as I talk to you and I'm just, I don't see how there's not anything being done

37:23

about this because even in a very

37:35

conservative government, this is a kind of vice that could genuine, in my opinion, could genuinely cause a form of financial crisis with young people, especially at a time when young people have trouble accumulating wealth.

37:37

Well, I mean, we don't know entirely what's happening on a regulatory front. Again, we've reported that the CFTC has some sort of investigation ongoing into Polymarket, although we don't know the scope or details of that. And just from myself covering crypto for the last many years, often federal inquiries, when they happen, can take many years. And so I think a lot of these platforms are very new and so I don't think we necessarily know if and how from a regulatory perspective things might unfold.

37:52

I should add here as well that both Polymarket and its primary competitor Kalshi have ties to the White House in the form of involvement from Donald Trump Jr. So Donald Trump Jr. Is a strategic advisor to Kalshi. He is, is, through an investment fund, an investor in Polymarket. We don't have any reporting to suggest that that has played any kind of role in the regulator's willingness or unwillingness to take on prediction markets. But I think that that's important to mention here.

38:28

Yeah, I mean, I will say I would buy that they like doing this because it makes things easier for them, but I also think there's just no regulatory enforcement at the moment. There's just like it feels we're just in a regulatory vacuum. Where the damage is going to come, not so much from what happens, but what doesn't happen. What there isn't an aggression. Like we don't like the FTC could cut in here at some point. I don't know. It feels that the SEC could do something. But to your point earlier around crypto, it feels that when Gary Gensler left the sec, that was kind of the end of the. Any serious crypto regulation anyway, which would have likely led to regulating this.

39:01

Yeah, I mean, we're obviously extremely interested in what, if any, actions regulators will take on this. And we plan to continue reporting and try to find out more about what's going on behind the scenes here.

39:43

Yeah. Well, any closing thoughts? Anything left off from the industry that I haven't gone over? Because this has been wonderful and also truly darkened my heart. Like, I'm gonna need to take a

39:55

walk around the block.

40:05

Oh, Ed, I'm so sorry to hear that.

40:06

No, no, it's not your fault. It's been a very un. Entertaining episode. But just this whole story is so grim.

40:07

It's a feeling I understand. I mean, I think what really stuck with me through all this reporting was just how good the videos were at purporting to be on Polymarket. And it gave me a bunch of anxiety for family members who are younger and even myself. But more them how hard this is to actually know. Is what you're watching truly something real or is it deceptive in some sort of manner? And so that's been what stuck with me.

40:14

Yeah, it does feel like social media is becoming increasingly fake in that way.

40:46

Go ahead.

40:52

Yeah, I would underscore what Caitlin said. That is also something that has really been resonating with me. And I would just add that if any of your listeners have experiences with prediction markets, we'd love to hear from them. And our contact information is on our Author pages on WFJ.com well, as we

40:53

wrap up then, where can people find you?

41:11

Find us in the Wall Street Journal if you're a print head. We still publish in print, but otherwise it's WSJ.com we live and breathe on

41:13

social media right now, so you can give us a follow there too.

41:23

Yeah, where are you at? You on Twitter and bluesky or just Twitter or where can we find you?

41:26

I'm on Twitter at. By K Long and on Bluesky at. You know, I don't, I don't remember my username.

41:31

All of my socials are CE Ostroff, so I like should be relevant.

41:40

Caitlin has the. Caitlin has the best nominative determinism initials of all time. Her initials are CEO and she is our boss.

41:44

No, Neil is our boss.

41:52

Big shout out to Neil for finding Poi Market. I am of course Ed Zetron. I'll be back with a monologue on Friday. You can of course bet on this on goot. Each GOOT is worth a thousand slubs, so make sure to invest your slubs based on the number of times I said the in this episode. That will of course funnel into a It's an account in the Cayman Islands. I have. It's fully legal. I've checked with many lawyers, several of which haven't been disbarred. You this is of course been Better Offline. I'm your host at Zitronic.

41:55

Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

42:23

The editor and composer of the Better

42:34

Offline theme song is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects@matasowski.com m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ez better offline or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed.app to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit.

42:36

Thank you so much for listening.

43:02

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you you get your podcasts.

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