Polymarket: Its Ads Showed $1.9M of Winning Bets. None Were Real

In January 2026 a college student posted a video that appeared to show him making about $100,000 on Polymarket. His bet was that Donald Trump would say the word "McDonald's" during the month, and the clip showed Trump saying it. According to The Wall Street Journal, the clip of Trump was two months old. More than 50 real customers made the same bet on Polymarket that January. Every one of them lost.

The video was one of 1,105 posted by 10 paid creators between December 2025 and mid-May 2026 that the Journal reviewed for an investigation published on 20 June. About 70% of them showed someone placing a bet. Those bets added up to roughly $1.9 million, and none was a real trade on Polymarket. The videos were filmed on near-identical copies of its website, the Journal reported. One sat at poiymarket.com, which reads as "polymarket" when the "i" is written as a capital I. Polymarket said it was "committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets" and would audit its promotional content.

Four months later the affair reached the top of the company. On 22 October the New York Post reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Polymarket had fired its chief marketing officer, Matthew Modabber, after an internal investigation. Polymarket declined to comment to the Post. Two days earlier Bloomberg had reported that an investor made the founder and chief executive, Shayne Coplan, repay company money spent on private jets and his rent.

What Polymarket sells

Polymarket is a prediction market: a website where people buy and sell shares in the answer to a yes-or-no question about a real event. Will a candidate win? Will a central bank cut rates? A Yes share pays $1 if the answer turns out to be Yes and nothing if it is No. If it trades at 30 cents, the crowd is putting the chance at about 30%. In stock-market terms it is a binary option. In everyday terms it is a bet, except that customers bet against each other rather than against a bookmaker. Every dollar a winner collects is a dollar someone on the other side lost.

Bets are placed in USDC, a stablecoin (a digital token built to stay worth one US dollar), and recorded on a blockchain, a shared public ledger. In January 2022 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the US regulator for futures and options, fined Polymarket's company, Blockratize Inc., $1.4 million for offering unregistered event contracts, and its main site has been closed to Americans ever since. It later bought QCEX, a small CFTC-licensed exchange, to run a separate US service.

The business grew fast: from a $1.2 billion valuation in 2025 to $15 billion by April 2026, after Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, agreed in October 2025 to invest up to $2 billion. In August Bloomberg reported that 1789 Capital, a venture firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, was leading a $1 billion round at $21 billion. Trump Jr. has advised Polymarket since August 2025.

The videos

The Journal's detail was worse than its totals. In 118 of the videos, creators celebrated nearly $900,000 of winnings that did not exist. Checked against the real markets, the same positions would have lost more than $166,000. The creators, mostly college age, were paid about $2,000 to $3,000 a month and told not to say Polymarket was paying them. A marketing contractor, Virality, ran a network of "clippers" who reposted cut-down versions of the videos, and paid them only if at least 60% of their audience was in the United States, the one big market where Polymarket's main site is off limits. The analytics firm Tubular estimated the videos were watched more than 140 million times on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

On 24 July Semafor published an internal one-minute how-to video, titled "Getting Started with Fakecharts: Setup and Deposits", which had been shared with creators on a Polymarket Discord account. In it a Polymarket marketing employee deposits $1,000 of play money on whether Trump would acquire Greenland before 2027 and clicks "Buy Yes". "This is fake money," he says, then: "I mean real money, obviously." Some creators, Semafor reported, were given a list of banned words that included "betting" and "gambling".

This matters even to people who will never place a bet. A broker that advertised with a client's invented trading statement would be in trouble with regulators in most countries. A prediction market is a closed loop: the winnings in an advert have to come out of someone's pocket, and the McDonald's bet shows whose. In the United States the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires anyone paid to promote a product to disclose that "material connection" clearly.

The PayPal account

The videos were the summer's second investigation. On 5 June Politico reported that Modabber, chief marketing officer since January 2024 and one of the company's earliest employees, had sent more than $2.5 million to more than 800 people from a personal PayPal account between January 2025 and February 2026. At least $350,000 went to about two dozen creators and commentators from across the political spectrum, who posted about Polymarket on X at least 490 times without clearly saying they had been paid. Politico did not say the payments were illegal. A Polymarket spokesperson told Politico that working with influencers was standard business practice, and declined to comment on disclosure or on the use of a personal account.

On 25 June Senators John Curtis, a Utah Republican, and Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, wrote to the CFTC's chairman, Michael Selig. "If accurate, these allegations are deeply troubling and demand immediate scrutiny," they wrote, and asked whether the agency was investigating. The next day CNBC, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that a CFTC investigation of Polymarket was "ongoing and extensive", and Bloomberg reported that it covered staged trades and fake winning bets.

Also on 26 June the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA) sued Polymarket, Coplan and Modabber in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia under the city's Consumer Protection Procedures Act. The complaint alleges undisclosed paid posts and fake-bet videos filmed on a simulated version of the platform. It also alleges that the company used an agency to recruit college students, paid $500 to $2,000 a campaign.

The marketing chief's exit

On 20 October Bloomberg reported that Polymarket had already restructured its marketing team, demoting Modabber and bringing in Travis VanderZanden, founder of the electric-scooter company Bird, who had joined as chief growth officer in August. Two days later the New York Post went further. Citing people familiar with the matter, it reported that Modabber, described as a close ally of Coplan, had been fired after an internal investigation into incidents that had worried investors, and that the two sides were working out the terms of his exit. By 23 October neither Polymarket nor Modabber had said anything in public about it.

The boss's private jets

The Bloomberg story, by Annie Massa and Ben Weiss, was mostly about Coplan. According to people familiar with the matter, when Founders Fund, the venture firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, examined Polymarket before investing in 2025, it found that Coplan had used company money for private jet flights, his apartment rent and other personal expenses at a time when Polymarket made no revenue. Founders Fund required him to repay the money and tighten financial controls before it invested at the $1.2 billion valuation.

A Polymarket spokesperson told Bloomberg the flights were for business, that Coplan had "proactively" disclosed the expenses, and that he "made a good-faith repayment, which came out to less than a software engineer's annual salary." The exact sum has not been published. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of Dragonfly, an early investor, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying Coplan "disclosed the back pay, an immaterial amount, and there was obviously zero bad intent." Coplan, 28, told Bloomberg: "There were real growing pains, and I personally had to grow and change into what the company needed."

Bloomberg also reported that ICE and Founders Fund have both urged Coplan to hire a chief operating officer, which he has not done, and that he hired the company's first chief financial officer in September. Alex Spiro, Elon Musk's personal lawyer, now sits on Polymarket's four-person board.