On June 25, 2026, Senators John Curtis (R-Utah) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) sent a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission urging the regulator to investigate Polymarket’s promotional practices.
What the Wall Street Journal found
The senators were responding to a Wall Street Journal investigation that documented a coordinated influencer campaign run by Polymarket. According to the reporting, Polymarket paid college-age influencers to post videos on X promoting what appeared to be genuine trading wins.
The problem: the wins were fake.
The WSJ identified 118 paid ads as part of the campaign. The trades shown in those ads depicted cumulative wins of nearly $900,000. Had those same positions actually been placed on Polymarket’s real platform, they would have produced losses exceeding $166,000.
