😡 Polymarket's Deceptive Marketing Scandal

A Wall Street Journal Investigation Reveals Awful Business Behavior

Jun 29, 2026

On today’s menu:

💰 Polymarket is getting flak for its influencer marketing
🎬 Google Invests $75M in film company A24

Polymarket Built a Fake Website to Trick College Kids Into Thinking Betting Was Easy

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Polymarket paid dozens of influencers — mostly college-aged — to film fake bets and fake wins on near-perfect copies of its own site, including a lookalike domain called poiymarket.com with a lowercase “i” instead of an “l.”

Across 1,105 videos reviewed between December 2025 and mid-May 2026, 70% showed bets that never happened — totaling $1.9 million in fabricated winnings.

Had those same bets been placed on the real platform, they would have lost more than $166,000.

Creators were paid $2,000–$3,000 per month, told not to disclose the arrangement, and the videos racked up 140 million views across socials — specifically targeted at American audiences despite Polymarket being banned from the U.S. since 2022.

The why is obvious: prediction markets are a near-perfect funnel for young people who already gamble, and the pitch — “I just turned $500 into $100K” — is indistinguishable from sports betting ads that have already normalized gambling among Gen Z.

Here are more numbers: a Columbia University study found roughly 25% of Polymarket’s historical trading volume was likely wash trading, and a prior WSJ analysis found 67% of all profits went to just 0.1% of accounts.

So: most people lose, a tiny few win everything, and the platform built a fake website to make losing look like winning.

The National Association of Consumer Advocates filed a lawsuit on June 26, and both the FTC and CFTC face pressure to act — though with the CFTC down 25% of staff and Donald Trump Jr. as a paid advisor to Kalshi and a major investor in Polymarket, meaningful enforcement looks unlikely.

Hollywood’s Most Credible Studio Just Let AI In

Google invested $75 million in A24 on June 22 — its first-ever equity stake in a film studio — as part of a multiyear research partnership embedding Google DeepMind directly inside A24’s active film productions to build AI filmmaking tools using Veo, its video generation model.

The film studio is famous for producing Oscar-winning films like Moonlight and Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, and churns out multiple blockbusters/A-list films every year.

So this is a big deal – Google is collaborating with the best of the best here.

Google gets no access to A24’s film library, and the first tool being built is an AI storyboard generator — pre-production, not production — to avoid the perception that it’s replacing actors or directors.

A24 said “we’d rather have a seat at the table than sit on the sidelines.”

Wow; if you can’t beat them, join them, I guess.

The film industry’s reaction was immediate and negative.

A24’s most celebrated director, Kane Parsons of Backrooms, said he’d erase generative AI “forever” if he could — and nearly 1,000 actors, agents, and crew members signed an open letter against a major studio demanding child actors allow their voices to be used for AI.

At least 2,000 working storyboard artists in Hollywood today sit directly adjacent to what this partnership is building, and “AI assists filmmakers, it doesn’t replace them” is the same sentence every studio has said right before replacing someone.

But the bigger story is strategic. Netflix, Lionsgate, and Amazon’s MGM all have active AI programs — A24 was the holdout, the indie darling with cultural credibility that no other studio has.

Google didn’t buy a film library. It bought the trust of the most filmmaker-first studio in America — and a front-row seat inside the productions that shape culture.

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