Polymarket Lawsuit Claims Platform Secretly Paid Content Creators for Deceptive Social Media Posts

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that Polymarket, unbeknownst to the public, has paid social media influencers to share videos of themselves seemingly winning big on the prediction market when, in reality, the bets were not real and were placed on “counterfeit versions” of the platform run on internal development servers.

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The 22-page Polymarket lawsuit states that the platform, which allows real-money bets on whether a future event will occur, was banned in the United States until it launched a separate, regulated product for American customers. As the platform could not lawfully be available to U.S. consumers for years, Polymarket likewise could not lawfully advertise stateside either, the suit states. 

However, the class action lawsuit alleges that Polymarket instead advertised its platform “without saying so” by rolling out a content creator-based marketing campaign disguised as ordinary users posting organic, personal videos. Per the suit, Polymarket paid the creators to post content featuring themselves betting on Polymarket and winning “constantly and enormously,” sharing the videos with American audiences “as if they were ordinary users sharing good news.” 

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According to the case, the versions of Polymarket on which the content creators supposedly placed winning bets were copies of the platform built by Polymarket itself, meant to look “identical to the real platform but for a stray detail in the address bar.” 

The suit says the winnings “were invented the same way the bets were.” Roughly one in 10 videos included spliced old footage and false headlines to “make a loss look like a jackpot,” the complaint states. 

The content creators worked off scripts provided by Polymarket, calling their purported winnings “free money” and “free bread,” and were paid by the defendant from a personal payment account linked to the company’s chief marketing officer, the suit alleges. The lawsuit claims that Polymarket told the content creators to not reveal that they were paid and, per the complaint, “most never did until reporters started asking.” 

The case adds that Polymarket also employed a marketing firm that paid “an army of users” to repost the videos “scrubbed of any tie to Polymarket,” making the content seem “personal and organic.” According to the suit, these users were paid only when at least 60 percent of their audience was in the U.S., “the one country Polymarket was barred from serving.” 

“The videos worked, collectively drawing more than 140 million views,” the filing states. 

Per the suit, people who saw the videos had no way to tell that they featured staged trades and fabricated winnings and were paid for by Polymarket itself. Instead, viewers were led to believe that ordinary users could “win money with ease” on Polymarket, the case says. 

According to the lawsuit, more than 70 percent of Polymarket users lose money, with approximately 67 percent of all gains on the platform coming from just 0.1 percent of all accounts—a group comprised of “a small circle of sophisticated traders” employing data-driven algorithmic strategies to influence event odds. 

The lawsuit claims that if proposed class members had known the truth, they would not have signed up for or spent money on Polymarket, or would have done so on different terms. 

The Polymarket lawsuit was filed in the District of Columbia on the heels of a June 2026 Wall Street Journal investigation that reportedly uncovered Polymarket’s deceptive advertising scheme.

The Polymarket class action lawsuit looks to cover all District of Columbia residents who signed up for and funded a Polymarket account during the applicable statute of limitations period and until a class is certified. 

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