Polymarket allegedly paid influencers to promote controversial election wagering

On November 5, Polymarket was accused of using paid content creators, influencers, and paid ads across multiple social media platforms to lure users into subtly suggested bets. Polymarket’s owners, Blockratize Inc., spent $269,875 on Trump-friendly social media ads. 

According to NBC News, Facebook’s ad library data showed that Polymarket spent at least 50K on Meta alone for a 45-ad campaign promoting the presidential election odds. With some ads reading, “Don’t trust the polls—trust the markets,” flooding social media platforms, one ad depicting a Trump win was viewed by 900,000 on Facebook and Instagram.

Polymarket called out for promoting ‘banned’ and ‘skewed’ election betting

The predictions-betting platform Polymarket has been paying US-based social media influencers to promote election betting on the site — even though it’s barred from letting anyone in the country use the tool to place wagers https://t.co/SH4qNNekLY

— Bloomberg Crypto (@crypto) November 5, 2024

Bloomberg reported on November 5 that Polymarket was allegedly involved in an “unfair” targeted promotion of the U.S. elections through multiple social media channels. According to the media company, out of the 900K viewers of a highlighted ad, 20% were men, and 12% were women between the ages of 45 and 54. The ad’s viewers were distributed across different states, with 16% of viewers in California, 11% in New York, and 10% in Texas.

The blockchain betting company was accused of paying U.S.-based influencers to promote the site to U.S. citizens who used VPNs to partake in the banned betting activities. 

As per outreach messages seen by Bloomberg News, the senior director of growth at Polymarket, Armand Saramout, canvassed for sponsorship deals with U.S. influencers. The ads consequently flooded social media pages with large followings in the last few weeks with hashtags like PolymarketPartner and PMPartner. 

Xavi Farhard, with over 16 million followers – mostly millennial women – is one of the influencers who penned a multi-post deal with Polymarket. Another influencer who asked to be anonymous said that the betting firm had never explicitly stated in all their years of working together that the content and ads created for the platform would be tailored to target gamblers outside the United States.

Polymarket also failed to disclose that the percentages shared in their ads favoring Trump were odds based on user bets and not representative of actual voter polling.

Over 50% of the ads did not mention that the numbers presented were rooted in prediction-based markets and not voter reality. One user bet over $2 million for a Kamala win, while another bet $15 million for a Trump win. The total volume for “Who would win the 2024 elections”  was well over $3 billion.

Polymarket seeks to set the record straight

Claudio Vallejo, a content creator on TikTok, said that Trump and a few other right-wing influencers deceptively pushed Polymarket odds as polls. He added that the odds were falsely used as proof that Trump was peaking at the right time and that he could not possibly lose to Kamala with such a huge difference. 

In its defense, the betting company, through several spokespersons led by the company’s CEO, said that the misleading presentations were not intended to influence the actual election results in any way.

“The idea is if people disagree with the market price, they have the opportunity to capitalize by buying the side they think is priced too low.”

–Shayne Coplan, CEO of Polymarket

Coplan took to social media, saying that his platform is a nonpartisan, nonpolitical platform that harnessed the power of free markets to serve as a reality check on life matters.

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