Polymarket paid dozens of social media creators to film themselves placing fake bets, and sometimes faking wins, on close replicas of its website, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published Saturday.
The Journal reviewed 1,105 videos from 10 creators posted between December 2025 and mid-May. A bet appeared in about 70% of them. None of the wagers, worth roughly $1.9 million, were real.
In one January clip, college student George Makihara showed a $100,000 win on a bet that President Donald Trump would say "McDonald's" that month. The footage of Trump saying the word was two months old. More than 50 real accounts placed the same bet in January, and all of them lost, the Journal found.
Polymarket built dummy sites for the videos, including one at the misspelled URL "poiymarket.com," which resembles the true "polymarket.com" domain when the 'i' is capitalized. Across 118 videos, creators celebrated nearly $900,000 in fabricated winnings. Those bets would actually have lost more than $166,000.
Creators were paid about $2,000 to $3,000 a month and told not to disclose the arrangement, the Journal reported. Some added "@polymarket partner" to their bios only after the paper started asking questions. The firm worked closely with a hired marketing contractor in order to promote the site, per the report.
