Polymarket: How Fake Success Stories Are Created
A Wall Street Journal investigation reveals that viral videos showcasing massive winnings on Polymarket are staged. The company paid students to execute dummy transactions on fake websites to attract users.
George Makihara appears in videos he posted as someone earning significant sums of money from betting on Polymarket. In January, the student posted a video in which he appeared to have won $100,000 from a bet that President Donald Trump would publicly say the word "McDonald's" during that month.
According to the videos he posted, this bet was one of 145 that Makihara appeared to have made on the Polymarket site between January and mid-May—bets that totaled nearly $410,000. However, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, none of them were real.
Makihara, who declined to comment, is one of dozens of content creators, most of them college-aged, whom Polymarket paid to film themselves making fictitious transactions and sometimes raking in fictitious winnings. This is according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos conducted by The Wall Street Journal, alongside training materials and interviews with content creators who worked with the company.
According to public data from the Polymarket site, more than 50 accounts did indeed bet in January that Trump would say the word "McDonald's." They all lost.
In its efforts to attract users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket flooded social media with videos that appear authentic at first glance. In practice, the platform built almost perfect copies of its site and instructed content creators to make dummy transactions on those sites and hide the fact that they received payment from the company.
