How WSJ reporters caught Polymarket faking its own site

In this episode of Show & Tell, hosts Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis sit down with Wall Street Journal reporters Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta, who found that Polymarket paid creators to place fake bets on a faked version of its platform.

By reviewing more than 1,100 videos, they noticed that the screenshares themselves were from a faked version of the website. They discovered that the website was provided by Polymarket itself to paid creators. Along with uncovering that creators were paid to promote fake payouts, the reporters discovered that a firm called Virality ran a clipping campaign to promote the content to a US audience.

What You'll Learn:

📍Scoping a video corpus: Why the WSJ reporters decided to narrow down the videos they’d review to a subset of creators and focus on TikTok

📍Debunking a trade: How to use Polymarket’s public market data to see whether a bet actually materialized or not

📍You can’t automate everything: Only multiple human reviews of the videos led the reporters to find the discrepancies that exposed the fake sites – an AI assistant saw nothing wrong with the content

About Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta:

Caitlin Ostroff is a reporter who blends shoe-leather reporting with programming and data analysis. She is the co-author of “The Grifter’s Club.” Neil Mehta is a news associate at the Wall Street Journal who previously worked at New York Public Radio.

Links Referenced in Episode:

📍"They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real" (WSJ) https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-bets-prediction-market-441cdeb5

📍Polymarket Gamma Markets API: https://docs.polymarket.com/developers/gamma-markets-api/gamma-structure

📍Kalshi API: https://docs.kalshi.com/welcome

📍Dune Analytics: https://dune.com

📍Caitlin's post-publication stress bake — peach pie crumb bars: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/peach-pie-crumb-bars/

📍You can follow Caitlin at ceostroff.bsky.social and Neil at neilmhta.bsky.social

ABOUT SHOW & TELL:

Show & Tell from Indicator takes you inside digital investigations as leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and researchers walk through real cases they've cracked. Each episode features a recognized figure in the OSINT, digital investigations, or trust & safety community. They don't just tell us what they did — they show us.

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