They built a fake betting parlor, stocked it with paid actors pretending to win, and aimed it at every college kid with a phone — then called it a prediction market and asked the regulators to stay out of its way. The Journal found the money was fake — the bets simulated, the wins manufactured, the entire social-media operation a sockpuppet army of accounts instructed to seem “personal and organic” — while the platform, banned from offering its primary exchange to Americans since 2022, targeted them anyway. The investigation, published this week, reviewed 1,105 videos from ten Polymarket-endorsed creators and found that seventy percent showed bets being placed; not one was real. The depicted wagers totaled $1.9 million. One hundred and eighteen videos showed creators celebrating nearly $900,000 in wins. In reality, those bets would have lost more than $166,000. All of it — every whoop of victory, every flashing balance screen, every “bro, this is just free” — was filmed on counterfeit copies of Polymarket’s own website, built to be indistinguishable from the real thing. The platform that promised to surface the wisdom of the crowd turned out to be manufacturing the crowd and scripting its wisdom.
I want to grant the strongest honest version of the case for prediction markets before I refuse it, because the betrayal is worse if you understand what was actually being betrayed. Friedrich Hayek’s great insight — the one I carried with me out of Chicago and still believe — is that economically relevant knowledge is dispersed among millions of people, and no single mind can aggregate it. Prices are the mechanism that does what no planner can: they let a farmer in the next county signal something about next year’s corn supply, and a trader in the next building act on it, and neither one needs to know the other exists. A prediction market is this logic applied to future events. If a thousand people with genuine stakes bet on whether a ceasefire holds, the resulting price says something no expert panel can. Polymarket’s 2020 election markets, where bettors priced a Trump victory while pollsters modeled a Biden lead, were a real demonstration of this. If you believe that case — and it is a serious one — then you would want these markets to thrive.
But what Polymarket actually built was not a market that aggregates dispersed knowledge. It was an architecture that manufactures consensus at industrial scale and floods it into the phones of the people least equipped to resist it. The Journal found that Polymarket constructed near-perfect copies of its own website — one using the misspelled URL “poiymarket.com,” capitalization rendering the fake “i” invisible — and directed college-age creators to film themselves trading on these dummy sites. The creators were instructed not to disclose that they were being paid, typically $2,000 to $3,000 a month. A marketing contractor called Virality managed a network of accounts that redistributed the videos across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram; the accounts were told to strip any Polymarket branding from their profiles so the reposts would seem “personal and organic.” One instruction read: “If you have ‘Polymarket’ in your account name, please rename them and remove it as soon as possible. Not even ‘poly’ is allowed.” The clipping campaign accumulated more than 140 million views. The target audience was explicitly American: as of early June, Virality only paid clippers if at least sixty percent of their audience was in the United States — the country where Polymarket is banned from offering its primary exchange.
Nearly twenty-five percent of the videos used the word “free.” The hook phrases — free bread, free money, just free, bro, this is just free — were scripted. Polymarket sent bullet-point guidance on what to say. The creators would open the counterfeit site, place a simulated bet, and narrate it as though it were real. Some reacted to outdated footage or fabricated headlines suggesting they had won. George Makihara, a college student, posted a video of himself leaping up as though Trump had said “McDonald’s” — a bet that appeared to win $100,000. Trump never said it publicly that month; the clip was from two months earlier. On the actual Polymarket site, more than fifty accounts made that bet in January. All of them lost. The fakery extended to the recently launched U.S. app, which is regulated by the CFTC: simulated trades were filmed on a counterfeit version of that interface too, distinguishable by small discrepancies — “2026 FIFA World Cup” instead of “26 World Cup.” The company’s deception did not stop at the offshore back door; it followed the product through the regulatory front door, dressed in the same costume.
This is the first thing I need you to see. Polymarket did not fail at price discovery. It succeeded at something else entirely — the production and distribution of false testimony disguised as spontaneous user experience. That is not a market. It is a centrally planned deception operation that uses the vocabulary of markets to immunize itself against scrutiny. Hayek’s argument works precisely because participants have real stakes and real knowledge. When seventy percent of the promoted bets are simulated and the remaining thirty percent are made on a platform that is violating its own settlement with the CFTC, the “price” being discovered is contaminated at the source. What Polymarket aggregates is not dispersed knowledge but manufactured virality — the product of a machine designed to make a lie travel faster than the truth. The deeper Hayekian point stands and indicts the thing Polymarket built: a genuine market cannot be faked, and a fake one cannot be real. This is not spontaneous order. It is not even a simulacrum of spontaneous order. It is central planning wearing a market’s clothes — the very thing Hayek spent his life opposing.
And now I need you to see the second thing, which is worse than the fakery itself: the architecture of protection that surrounds it. The Trump administration’s CFTC has filed more than half a dozen lawsuits to stop states from regulating and taxing prediction markets. The President posted on Truth Social that it is “critically important” that the CFTC have exclusive authority over prediction markets and called politicians who want states to regulate them “SCUM.” His son Don Jr. is an investor in Polymarket and a paid adviser to its primary rival, Kalshi. This is not deregulation. This is the active use of federal power to shield a financial operation from the democratic oversight of the communities it targets — while members of the protecting family profit from both sides of the duopoly. When Polymarket settled CFTC allegations in 2022 that it was operating an unregistered options exchange, it paid the fine, agreed to stop serving U.S. customers, and reincorporated in Panama. It never stopped targeting Americans. Now it is seeking to reverse that settlement and bring the crypto exchange back into the United States, according to the Journal’s sources — and the administration that is supposed to be the regulator is instead clearing the path. When the federal agency that exists to police this kind of deception is instead ordered to sue the states that try to do the policing, the market isn’t free — it is captured. This is not the first time the platform’s lack of internal controls has surfaced as a federal case.
The conservative movement once understood — or claimed to understand — what subsidiarity means. It means the community closest to the harm has the first and deepest authority to protect itself. A state that says to its citizens, we will not let an offshore bookie with a sockpuppet army and a federal protector target your children with fabricated testimonials of free money, is exercising exactly the kind of authority subsidiarity defends. And the federal government, suing that state to stop it, while the President’s son collects checks from the companies being shielded, is subsidiarity inverted. This is what fusionism has come to: the “freedom” it now defends is the freedom of concentrated financial power to operate beyond the reach of the people whose money it takes, backed by the full coercive apparatus of the state.
The platform’s own promotional materials make the inversion explicit. Polymarket and Virality promoted videos in which Adin Ross, a twenty-five-year-old with millions of young followers and a multimillion-dollar Polymarket deal, discussed how he could use inside information to trade on the platform — including, in one video, exploiting his acquaintance with the hip-hop artist Drake to trade on a forthcoming album’s release date. The Journal identified at least nineteen videos promoted through the clipping network that discussed opportunities for insider trading. Polymarket’s response was to say that it “prohibits trading based on stolen information, illegal tips, or information obtained in breach of a duty of trust.” It was simultaneously paying to distribute videos that showed exactly that. The platform that tells regulators it has a “market integrity framework” tells its marketing contractors to promote footage of people bragging about how to cheat. This is not a contradiction. It is a business model — one in which the appearance of integrity is the product, and actual integrity is an operating cost to be minimized.
I have watched the young people in these videos — the college students filming fake trades for $2,000 a month, the teenagers in Asia redistributing them for clip bounties — and I do not see predators. I see recruits. Financial precarity is its own recruitment pipeline, and Polymarket runs it with the efficiency of any extraction operation. The kids who need the money are paid to deceive the kids who have the money, and the platform sits in Panama, protected from the consequences by a government that calls any attempt at oversight “SCUM.” The weaponization of precarity is not an accident of this system. It is the system. And the same kids faking the wins are the kids who have been told the wins are real.
There was a time — I remember it; I do not have to invent it — when the movement that called itself conservative warned that a casino in every pocket and a stock ticker promising free money to people who could not afford to lose would dissolve the communities that actually produce things. The town, the family, the parish, the farm. Now that same movement is celebrating exactly this as innovation, as freedom, as the future. What does “conservative” mean when it is the loudest voice cheering the thing it once defined itself against? We have been told for decades that the market rewards ingenuity, that the American economy is a meritocracy of the agile mind, and that the rootless global casino will shower us with whatever it produces. Meanwhile, what it actually produced, every time, was another way to extract value from a place while owning nothing in it — the private-equity nursing home, the subscription-everything landlord, the sports-betting app that replaced the bookie down the street with a frictionless 24-hour drain on a young man’s paycheck. Polymarket is simply the latest and most literal expression of that principle: a betting platform that will lie to you about your odds, film fake winners, and route the losses through an offshore shell while the political class that approves the whole business takes its cut.
The left, to its credit, sees the extraction. It sees the financialization, the predation, the fact that an offshore platform with a Panamanian address and a federal protector is vacuuming money out of communities that never asked for it. But it stops short of naming what should replace it — and that is where the argument must not stop. A federal agency captured by the industry it regulates is not the answer. The CFTC’s own behavior in this story is proof enough. You will forgive a parish-hall Catholic who works a co-op for pointing out that the cure for a concentration of unaccountable private power is rarely a concentration of unaccountable public power that the very same donor class will eventually reregulate in its own favor. The anti-concentration principle cuts both ways, or it is not a principle at all: the same logic that tells you a remote billionaire should not own the betting parlor should also tell you that the remote bureaucrat should not own the only alternative.
What is needed is what the farm co-op has been for a hundred and fifty years: financial institutions that are owned by the people who use them, governed by those same people, and rooted in the places where they live. The credit union. The mutual insurer. The cooperative bank. These are not nostalgic fantasies. They are the largest and oldest financial institutions in the country that never needed a sockpuppet army or a simulated website or a marketing contractor called Virality to earn the trust of their members. The institution that has kept the lights on in my own county for decades, Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, has never had to pay a college student to film a fake trade.
The answer — the thing we are actually after — is a community dense enough that a young man doesn’t need to chase a fake jackpot on his phone because his life already holds a stake in something real. A co-op that pays a patronage dividend, a credit union that keeps the county’s deposits working inside the county, a parish hall still holding fish fries, and a town where the kid who might have lost his evenings to a rigged prediction market is instead learning to keep the books for the fire department’s pancake breakfast. That world is not a nostalgic fantasy; I am describing institutions that still exist in Adams County, Wisconsin, and they are failing not because they are obsolete but because they have been permitted to be starved of the attention and the capital that the Polymarkets of the world vacuum up. You cannot fight a bucket shop with another bucket shop. You fight it by making the soil beneath it so thick with local ownership that nothing so hollow can take root.
None of this is complicated. It is merely inconvenient for a political class that has decided the fastest way to raise campaign cash is to let the rich man’s casino advertise itself as the people’s market. End the regulatory exemption that lets an offshore crypto casino market its fiction inside our borders. End the administration’s legal campaign to preempt state oversight, so that a Wisconsin regulator can at least ask the same questions of Polymarket that she does of a tavern pull-tab. Break up the bundle that lets a single platform own both the market and the marketing, and mandate real interoperability — let a user take his prediction-market volume to any exchange that can provide transparent, audited prices, the way a farmer can sell his corn to any elevator. And, above all, stop subsidizing the casino by taxing the co-op. Every dollar of public infrastructure that favors the placeless platform over the rooted institution is an active choice to hollow the town further.
“Innovation” that produces this — an offshore entity with powerful protectors displacing the community institution that served this place for generations, while calling anyone who resists a tyrant — conserves nothing. It is extraction with a lobby. The co-op is the counter-model. It always was. And a genuine market — one that actually aggregates real knowledge from real stakes — never needed a sockpuppet army to prove it. Polymarket’s fake trades earned it 140 million views. The co-op that supplies my neighbors with electricity, the credit union that underwrites the roof repair on Main Street — these do not go viral. They do not need to. They simply need a legal and economic architecture that stops punting them in favor of the next rent-extraction vehicle. The rest of the question is whether we are willing to build the kind of world where the actual gamble — the slow, quotidian work of owning something together — is more interesting than the rigged one on the screen.