A Wall Street Journal probe found none of the roughly $1.9 million in bets shown across 1,100-plus creator videos were real. Crypto prediction market platform Polymarket paid dozens of mostly college-age creators to film themselves placing fake bets, and sometimes faking wins, on near-identical copies of its website, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published Saturday. The paper reviewed 1,105 videos from 10 creators posted since December, found a wager in about 70%, and determined that none of the roughly $1.9 million in bets shown was real. He filmed the exciting moment he won $100,000—except the bet wasn’t real. A flood of videos showing fake trades is fueling Polymarket’s hype machine. https://t.co/LEgqvIRGvb They include a clip posted in January, which shows college st
A Wall Street Journal probe found none of the roughly $1.9 million in bets shown across 1,100-plus creator videos were real. Crypto prediction market platform Polymarket paid dozens of mostly college-age creators to film themselves placing fake bets, and sometimes faking wins, on near-identical copies of its website, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published Saturday. The paper reviewed 1,105 videos from 10 creators posted since December, found a wager in about 70%, and determined that none of the roughly $1.9 million in bets shown was real. He filmed the exciting moment he won $100,000—except the bet wasn’t real. A flood of videos showing fake trades is fueling Polymarket’s hype machine. https://t.co/LEgqvIRGvb They include a clip posted in January, which shows college student George Makihara celebrating a $100,000 win on a bet that President Donald Trump would say "McDonald's" that month. The Journal found that the footage Makihara was responding to had been filmed two months earlier. Trump never said the word publicly that January, and more than 50 real accounts that placed the same bet on Polymarket all lost.