Banned betting platform Polymarket paid US social media influencers for election content

Betting prediction platform Polymarket has paid US social media influencers to promote election betting on the site – even though not anyone in the country is allowed to use the tool to place bets, including Tuesday’s presidential race.

In September, Polymarket’s senior growth director Armand Saramout sought sponsorship deals with US influencers, according to briefing notes seen by Bloomberg News.

Over the past few weeks, Instagram pages with large followings have been posting content sponsored by Polymarket under hashtags such as #PMPartner and #PolymarketPartner. Most are meme pages with account names like @moist, @hoodclips, and @historyinmemes, while others are personal finance influencers like Eric Pan of @ericnomics.

A Polymarket spokesperson confirmed the US relationship but said it was not intended to trigger transactions from US visitors. “We reached out to influencers on both sides of the aisle to promote our data and drive traffic and eyeballs to polymarket.comwhere 99% of visitors consume news and never trade,” he said in a statement. But some US trades are still good – a behavior encouraged by influencers.

California-based Xavi Fahard helps run the Instagram meme page @sarcasm_only. The account, which has 16.6 million followers, reaches a predominantly female millennial audience, Fahard said. A few weeks ago, they were connected to Polymarket through agencies and have since concluded a multi-post deal with the betting platform.

“An ad will always have much less engagement than our actual organic posts,” Fahard said. “But compared to other ads, Polymarket’s are about the same, if not better.”

In October, Polymarket was in the process of conducting new checks to verify that high spenders on its website are outside the US, according to a spokesman. American traders are not allowed to use the platform, which has seen a surge in betting favoring Donald Trump to win the presidential election.

Polymarket has locked up US merchants following a $1.4 million settlement with Commodity Futures Trading Commissionwhich said it was operating without the correct license.

Polymarket’s control of US political markets grew significantly in October, thanks to a small number of accounts spending millions of dollars in cryptocurrency betting on Trump’s return to the White House. A company spokesman said they investigated and did not believe the account owner was trying to manipulate the market, but agreed not to open more of them.

The person behind the US Instagram account @trustfundterry, who asked not to reveal his real name so as not to damage his relationships, said he had worked with Polymarket for years. The company often shared a Google Drive of suggested content that it regularly posted for a fee.

Polymarket never told him that the content should be tailored for a non-US audience or asked him to mention that transactions should not take place in the US, he said. Few of the sponsored content posts from other accounts include such disclaimers.

On Monday, the day before the election, @trustfundterry posted a picture of Trump with 60.5% against Harris, with a map of most US states painted Republican red. “@Polymarket traders have Trump with the edge to win. He leads in the PA, which is the key to the election… Who do you think takes it?” The post included charts showing Trump’s lead in six key states.

Polymarket encouraged him to add memes to his posts, including Monday’s, according to the account owner. “They just want engagement and conversation — the goal is to get eyeballs,” he said.

Meanwhile, polls show Trump and Kamala Harris in a tight race with no clear winner.

Polymarket has sought to position itself as a more reliable alternative to polls, touting itself as “the most accurate way to track and forecast elections” in Facebook ads. But the company’s heavy user base of crypto-traders — a Trump-friendly demographic — could skew its results.

In addition to partnering with US influencers, Polymarket owner Blockratize Inc. spent about $269,875 on election ads targeting millions of people in the US on Facebook and Instagram over the past seven days, according to ad library Meta.

The ads asked viewers whether they were voting for Trump or Harris, telling viewers, “Don’t trust the polls — trust the markets.”

Of those 47 ads, 22 feature Trump alone, showing odds that the former president will win over his rival. One asked: “Did serving fries win Trump the election?”

Where Trump and Harris are shown together in ads, Trump has been shown to be ahead. None of the ads featured Harris alone.

A spokesman disputed a Trump tilt. “Any suggestion that Polymarket is targeting a single party or demographic has failed to take into account the rapidly changing market odds throughout this campaign or our clearly non-partisan and transparent approach to prediction markets,” he said in a statement .

— Margi Murphy and Teresa Xie for Bloomberg with assistance from Sarah Frier.