How Polymarket Made Fake Bets Go Viral

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Will Trump say Barack Hussein Obama this week? 25%?

**Ryan Knutson** (0:10)
Bro, he has to.
There are these videos you might have seen on TikTok or Instagram. They all follow the same kind of pattern. There's often someone who looks like a college student on their computer, looking at the betting site Polymarket.

**Katherine Long** (0:25)
They have tens of thousands of dollars, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in their Polymarket account. They place a bet.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:32)
The bets often seem trivial, like will Donald Trump say a certain word by a certain day? And the people in the videos make it seem like you're being lit in on a secret.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
Bro, what?

**Katherine Long** (0:43)
Will Trump say hat this week?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:45)
35 percent? Bro, this is crazy.

**Katherine Long** (0:48)
They press the buy button, confetti explodes across their screen. Then the camera cuts to them in front of a television, they're watching Donald Trump give a speech.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:59)
He'll take other things but not a free hat.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:01)
There it is. It happened. Trump said hat.

**Katherine Long** (1:04)
They jump up, they scream with joy, they're so excited, they've just won money.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:08)
Yes.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:10)
Our colleague Katherine Long has been covering prediction markets, along with data reporter Caitlin Ostroff. And in the videos, these people will make winning look easy.
Here's Caitlin.

**Caitlin Ostroff** (1:20)
They purport to make tens of thousands, sometimes more of dollars. And for college students, that is an insane amount of money.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:29)
Yeah, for anybody that's a lot of money.

**Caitlin Ostroff** (1:31)
For anybody that's a lot of money, but especially for college students, you know, you throw...

**Ryan Knutson** (1:34)
You're covering rent and you're throwing a really good party.

**Caitlin Ostroff** (1:37)
Yeah.

**Katherine Long** (1:37)
It's a lot of Chipotle bulls.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:40)
But it's not just Chipotle bull money. In the videos, Polymarket looks like a side hustle, or even a main hustle.
Take one woman named Hyann Nguyen.

**Katherine Long** (1:51)
She lives in San Francisco. She's in her mid-20s, and she appears to have this glamorous life based on her Polymarket earnings. In one video, she's dancing on a beach with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, and the text overlaying the video says, Polymarket funds my life, and video show her Polymarket account appears to have tens of thousands of dollars in it. That means she's sitting on a lot of cash.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:15)
In another video, she's wearing a gown.
Text on screen says, I could literally kiss the rich man that showed me this. Then it cuts to her trading on Polymarket. And so you did an investigation, and what did you discover about these videos?

**Katherine Long** (2:31)
We discovered that none of it was real.

**Caitlin Ostroff** (2:33)
Literally none.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:36)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, July 6th.
Coming up on the show, how Polymarket made fake bets go viral.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:02)
This episode is presented by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.

**Ryan Knutson** (3:38)
As they dove into the brave new world of prediction markets, Katherine and Caitlin have been spending a lot of time together.

**Caitlin Ostroff** (3:45)
To quote a phrase I've previously used, trauma bonded at this point, probably.

**Katherine Long** (3:48)
Or joined at the hip, I believe you said recently in a text message, yes. But Caitlin's the real data whiz on the team.

**Caitlin Ostroff** (3:55)
Katherine has the ability to find stuff that no one else does, so it's a dual effort.

**Katherine Long** (4:01)
I love going down a rabbit hole, it's one thing about me.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:04)
Prediction markets let you bet on everything, from who will win an election to whether it will rain tomorrow, to whether Jesus will return to Earth by 2027
They've been around in some form for a couple decades, but online platforms like Polymarket are a recent phenomenon. Here's Caitlin.

**Caitlin Ostroff** (4:20)
These are companies that have really scaled up over the last two years, Polymarket and its rival, Kalshi. Both are valued at tens of billions of dollars. It's attracted huge money from investors.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:31)
We should say that Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.