The Fake Polymarket: How a Prediction Market Built a Simulated Website to Trick Influencers and Viewers

In late 2025, Wall Street Journal reporters Catherine Long and Caitlin Ostroff started noticing something strange in their social media feeds. College-age creators were posting videos showing themselves placing bets on Polymarket, the crypto-based prediction market, and winning large sums of money. The videos were everywhere. The creators seemed to be making a living off the platform. One woman filmed herself dancing on a beach in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with the caption "Polymarket funds my life" and a Hello Kitty sticker reading "I am unemployed." Another showed account balances over $100,000.

The only problem: none of it was real.

Long and Ostroff, along with their colleague Neil Meta, spent weeks trying to trace the trades shown in these videos. Because Polymarket runs on blockchain, every trade is public. They had built a database of every single transaction. But when they tried to find the trades depicted in the videos, they simply didn't exist. The breakthrough came when Meta noticed that one creator had accidentally left a URL visible in his video: "poi.market" — a dummy site that Polymarket had built to look almost identical to the real thing.

The Simulated Operation