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Updated on: June 26, 2026 / 5:12 PM EDT

/ CBS News

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Polymarket told CBS News that it is auditing its promotional content after a Wall Street Journal investigation found the prediction market paid online content creators to produce videos that the newspaper said falsely showed customers winning a total of $1.9 million.The WSJ's findings, published on June 20, are based on interviews with social media content creators and an analysis of more than 1,100 TikTok videos from 10 creators. Most of the videos featured phony trades executed on dummy sites designed to resemble Polymarket, according to the Journal, which said the company's actions were part of a campaign to lure users to its offshore, unregulated platform.Polymarket also hired a marketing contractor to instruct so-called clippers, people who redistribute videos from creators to extend their reach, to repost the content, according to the media outlet's investigation. One social media video shows a college-aged student winning $100,000 after placing a $1,000 bet that President Trump would say the word "McDonald's" publicly sometime that month, according to the WSJ. But the actual trade on Polymarket's website shows 50 accounts bet that Mr. Trump would use the restaurant chain's name and that all of them lost, the paper reported.Other videos also misrepresented the earnings users could have made on parallel bets, the Journal's report found. The outlet reported that 118 videos — approximately 10% of the ones it analyzed — depicted creators winning almost $900,000, when in reality, if they had placed identical bets, they would have lost more than $166,000.On June 26, consumer protection firm Vaca Daffan Law filed a lawsuit against Blockratize, which operates Polymarket, and against Polymarker founder Shayne Coplan and chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber. The complaint alleges that the predicton market "orchestrated a sweeping and flagrantly deceptive marketing campaign that lures Americans into risking real money while obscuring how likely people are to lose."Polymarket said in a statement that it is committed to transparency and fair markets.