A proposed class action in D.C. federal court alleges Polymarket paid social media creators to film themselves winning big on counterfeit copies of its own platform, with the staged videos drawing over 140 million views. According to Class Action.org, the bets were fake and the winners were paid not to say so.
The winning videos were staged. Not a little staged, fully staged. Polymarket paid college kids to film themselves cashing out on a fake version of its own site, a copy so close to the real thing that the only tell was a small detail in the address bar. Ars Technica found the fake site was spelled poiymarket, which looks exactly like the real thing if you capitalize the I. The winners were reading from a script. The wins were "free money." The money wasn't.
Here's the part that should embarrass the whole influencer economy. The platform was banned from advertising in America, so it couldn't just run ads. So it did the next best thing: it made the ads look like they weren't ads. Regular people, personal videos, organic wins. It hired a marketing firm to run an army of reposters, and paid them only when 60% of their audience was in the one country the company was banned from serving. The targeting wasn't an accident. It was the whole point.
And the math at the bottom is the real story. Over 70% of Polymarket users lose money. The "jackpots" the creators faked, per the Journal, would have actually cost the bettors more than $166,000. The 140 million views weren't a preview of getting rich, they were a demo of the house edge, filmed by people getting paid a couple grand a month to nod.
YOUR TURN: if 70% of bettors lose money, why did the winning videos look so easy. that's the question the paid creators were hired to keep you from asking.
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