Polymarket Paid Influencers for Fake Bets in Copycat Videos, WSJ Says

Polymarket paid mostly college-student influencers to film videos showing fake bets on lookalike versions of its site, according to The Wall Street Journal. For high-risk PSPs, the relevant detail is not the gossip value but the mechanics: paid promo, undisclosed relationships, and a U.S.-targeted campaign around a platform that has been restricted from advertising to Americans since 2022.

1. The Wall Street Journal reviewed 1,105 videos from 10 creators, published from December through May. In about 70% of them, the bets shown totaled around $1.9 million, and the paper says none of those bets were real. Some videos used fake sites with typos in the domain, including poiymarket.com.
2. In 118 videos, creators displayed wins totaling almost $900,000. WSJ said those same bets would have produced losses of more than $166,000 in reality. One January video showed student George Makihara claiming a $100,000 win on a bet that Donald Trump would say “McDonald’s” before month-end; the confirming clip of Trump had been recorded two months earlier. WSJ said more than 50 real accounts made the same January bet, and all lost.
3. According to WSJ, the influencers were paid $2,000 to $3,000 a month and were not supposed to disclose the payment. Some added “polymarket partner” to their profiles, while others did not. The short-video network was run by the marketing firm Virality, which paid the creators only if at least 60% of an influencer’s audience was in the U.S.
4. The campaign reached a U.S. audience and generated more than 140 million views across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, according to Tubular. That matters because Polymarket has not been allowed to advertise its main prediction platform to Americans since 2022, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) imposed the restriction. U.S. residents can access the platform only through VPN.
5. Polymarket told the newspaper it would review its advertising content. The company has also been in earlier reporting tied to a multimillion-dollar deal with streamer Adin Ross, payments for at least 19 videos discussing ways to trade on insider information, and a Politico report from 5 June saying chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber used a personal PayPal account to pay influencers promoting Polymarket bets on X without advertising disclosure. Politico said more than $2.5 million was sent from that account to more than 800 recipients.

For PSPs and acquiring partners, the takeaway is straightforward: if a campaign touches U.S. audiences, prediction markets, undisclosed influencer payments, or platform access that depends on VPNs, the compliance questions show up before the marketing wins do. And once a payment trail runs through a personal PayPal account, the operational headache becomes everyone’s problem, not just the brand’s.