The WSJ reviewed 1,105 videos published by paid Polymarket creators between December 2024 and mid-May 2026. Roughly 70% featured a bet of some kind. None of the bets shown were real. Creators filmed the videos on near-perfect dummy websites, including domains such as poiymarket.com, designed to mirror the real platform's interface. Across the full video corpus, fabricated winnings totalled approximately $1.9 million. In 118 videos highlighted by the WSJ, staged wins amounted to around $900,000.

Creators were paid between $2,000 and $3,000 per month and were explicitly told not to disclose their relationship with Polymarket. Disclosure labels only appeared in creator bios, formatted as "@polymarket partner," after WSJ journalists began asking questions. Politico independently identified at least 490 posts on X without any paid-promotion label, and found approximately 24 creators involved in the campaign.

The campaign was managed through a marketing contractor called Virality, which instructed creators to make posts feel personal and organic rather than like formal ads. Virality then amplified the clips to more than 140 million combined views. Named participants in the campaign include Alex LoRusso, Brian Krassenstein, and Riley Gaines, a selection that crossed political affiliations to make the content appear broadly grassroots rather than coordinated.

Streamer Adin Ross held a separate multimillion-dollar deal with Polymarket, and dozens of clips from his channel were targeted for amplification.

Polymarket's Chief Marketing Officer, Matthew Modabber, reportedly used a personal PayPal account to transfer payments to creators, adding another layer of opacity to the arrangement.

Polymarket responded with a statement saying it is "committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets" and announced "a comprehensive audit of active promotional content."

The investigation lands at a legally sensitive moment for the platform. Polymarket's parent company, Blockratize Inc., was fined $1.4 million by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in January 2022 for operating off-exchange event-based binary options without proper designation as a contract market or swap execution facility.

The settlement included a cease-and-desist order barring U.S. customers from the platform. Despite that ban, Polymarket's offshore arm recorded $9 billion in monthly trading volume in April 2026, compared to $1.3 billion on its regulated U.S. counterpart, a ratio suggesting a significant portion of offshore activity originates with U.S. users accessing the platform via VPN.

In 2025, Polymarket acquired regulated futures exchange QCEX for $112 million in a bid to re-enter the U.S. market through legitimate channels. That re-entry effort now faces considerable reputational complications in light of the marketing revelations.

A separate House Oversight Committee probe, launched in May 2026, is examining whether U.S. government employees have used non-public information to trade on Polymarket and rival platform Kalshi. Researchers cited by the committee found 80 bets on Polymarket with a statistically impossible 98% win rate. Committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) stated on the record: "Members of Congress and government employees can use basic insider knowledge and make huge profits on anything government-related."

The fake-bet campaign is primarily an off-chain marketing problem, not an on-chain one. Polymarket's actual markets settle in USDC on the Polygon blockchain, and all trades are publicly verifiable. The WSJ investigation does not allege that the platform's markets were manipulated. That distinction matters for technically literate users, but it is unlikely to carry much weight with regulators who have already moved to restrict the platform.

Polymarket is now banned or restricted in more than 33 jurisdictions. Brazil blocked it in April 2026 under National Monetary Council Resolution No. 5,298, classifying prediction markets as unlicensed derivatives.

India issued a blocking order on May 21 under the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act 2025. Indonesia blocked the platform four days later, with its Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs calling it "an online gambling site disguised as a prediction market." The Indonesian action was partly triggered by a viral Polymarket market on President Prabowo's potential resignation, which attracted over $46,000 in trading volume.

The fake-marketing revelations, now public, are likely to reinforce each of those governments' stated rationales and make near-term reversal politically difficult.

For users and developers in African markets where Polymarket remains accessible, including South Africa, and where crypto regulation is unsettled, the implications are more diffuse but still significant.

Africa's crypto-native communities skew young and are precisely the demographic that these TikTok and YouTube campaigns targeted. Regulators in those countries have been watching global crypto enforcement patterns closely, and a high-profile fraud allegation against a major on-chain platform gives skeptical policymakers usable ammunition. The broader risk is that manipulative off-chain marketing practices delegitimise the transparency argument that Web3 products use to distinguish themselves from traditional finance, even when the on-chain mechanics themselves are clean.

The scandal surfaces as the prediction market sector reaches record levels by open interest. Open interest across all prediction markets hit $1.48 billion in the week ending June 15, 2026, a second consecutive all-time high, with year-over-year growth of sixfold. Total sector volume reached $51 billion in 2025, with projections pointing toward $240 billion in 2026.

The combination of the WSJ findings, ongoing congressional scrutiny, and accelerating international bans means Polymarket enters the second half of 2026 fighting on multiple regulatory and reputational fronts simultaneously.