Polymarket's viral videos showed people winning big, but the bets were fake

133 pointsposted 2 hours ago
by pseudolus
(arstechnica.com)

51 Comments

cogman10

an hour ago

All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.

If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.

We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.

One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.

ok_dad

an hour ago

We should just make gambling illegal online again, things were fine back when you couldn’t gamble online then, at least in the USA, the fucking supreme corpo guzzlers (formerly the Supreme Court) interpreted the laws according to their owners will and now we have gambling online.

dang

14 minutes ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly, and we've had to ask you many times not to. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(p.s. Just to pre-empt the usual: no, this is not a defense of Big Gambling, just an attempted defense of HN thread quality.)

Drupon

5 minutes ago

This comment was unnecessary and very distracting from a far more interesting discussion in the replies to the commenter you are attempting to condescend.

ipython

an hour ago

Exactly. Gambling in the real world involved friction. That plus a certain social stigma if you gambled outside of “mainstream” casinos.

And this helped weed out all but the most addicted gamblers. Now there is no friction, the platforms are free to create dark patterns to encourage problem gambling, and the vice has zero social cost.

irishcoffee

an hour ago

Probation was a thing, too. How did that turn out?

nemomarx

31 minutes ago

There wasn't some mass movement of people doing online gambling that led to the dam bursting and it getting legalized, though. Courts just made a different decision and opened it up one day and as far as I know there wasn't even mass lobbying about it?

lotsofpulp

26 minutes ago

There was mass lobbying, specificially by the taxpayers of the state of New Jersey, via their elected representatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...

Note that it was not a close decision:

> Opinion of the Court

>The Court announced a 7–2 judgment in favor of Murphy on May 14, 2018, reversing the Third Circuit.[25] Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch and in part by Justice Stephen Breyer.[26][27][28] The majority opinion agreed that §§ 3701(1) of PASPA commandeered power from the states to regulate their own gambling industries and thus was unconstitutional. It followed New York v. United States and reversed the Third Circuit decision.

geoduck14

27 minutes ago

Prohibition was incredibly successful at reducing the amount of alcohol people drank

ok_dad

an hour ago

You can’t download drugs and alcohol digitally.

Frankly, being able to buy drugs and alcohol online is probably a mistake, too.

j16sdiz

an hour ago

Most of their practice are illegal already. The problem is lack of enforcement.

We are not suing polymarket. We are not suing the marketing company. And we don't want online censorship.

IMO, the marketing company / media company should be sued. -- They are (relatively) easier target to sue. Many are US based and not going anywhere. With enough luck, this might give us a better internet with less SEO bullshit.

EA-3167

an hour ago

Just another hearty dividend thanks to corporate personhood and Citizen's United. Rarely has a single decision so thoroughly broken our system, but the regulatory capture is plain to see these days.

arjie

a minute ago

They are transparently marketing using outrage and bullshit. Pretty good tactic for the market.

cj

2 hours ago

I finally gave in to my curiosity and downloaded Kalshi last week to place a few bets on the World Cup.

I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.

They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.

I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.

(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)

This industry is wild.

holistio

an hour ago

Back in the good old days you needed a few more steps before you got into debt after gambling.

ElProlactin

16 minutes ago

Back in the good old days non-payment of gambling debt was a threat to your knee-caps. Today, you might get cut off from Klarna and have to extend your next auto loan to 256 months.

owlninja

an hour ago

I read a book this year about sports gambling in the US [1], and it points out how nasty and predatory it is. I think "prediction markets" have even less regulation? I would talk to my sports fan buddies at work and they would say "oh, just how sportsbooks in Vegas operate already", but this is on-demand, in your face, constantly nudging you to bet with dark patterns and "comps". I used to want sports gambling legal in the US, but the way it has gone is incredibly disgusting and is starting to make watching sports almost annoying. The crawl on the bottom is no longer scores, but moneylines...

[1] "Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling" (2026) by Danny Funt

october8140

2 hours ago

Is this fraud?

idle_zealot

2 hours ago

Would it matter if the bets were real and they picked the 0.00001% big winners to feature in the ad? Would that be less fraudulent in any meaningful sense, would it have a different impact on the world?

Is the real crime here that they were too lazy to lie with selective facts?

ceejayoz

2 hours ago

> Would that be less fraudulent…

Is this even a question? Yes, it would be less fraudulent.

idle_zealot

an hour ago

I question your definitions. In what sense is it legally or morally useful to discriminate between lying with statistics and lying without them? It's an academically useful distinction, but why does it matter in practice? People are misled, the misleading is intentional, but if you hire a statistician to do it for you instead of an actor then you're A-Okay?

SpicyLemonZest

30 minutes ago

It's useful because honesty and dishonesty are strongly self-correlated. Someone who works hard to ensure their advertising is technically true will likely work hard towards technically satisfying other goals and rules we set for them; someone who's comfortable outright lying in their ads will likely also lie about other things.

ggm

an hour ago

Would a prosecution have high chance of succeeding?

jcgrillo

an hour ago

Isn't everything these days? It's all gotten so gross.

matheusmoreira

32 minutes ago

Yeah. It's so demoralizing, seeing all these people make fortunes while honest people scrape by. It feels like getting in on the grift is the only way to make it.

realJared54

2 hours ago

Yes, it is 100% a misrepresentation of reality to fool the general public into joining a platform that condones deceptive user acquisition strategies.

jordanb

an hour ago

I was listening to a podcast and heard an ad for supplements (I think it was collegian). The thing that struck me was the specificity of the health claims they were making in the ad.

There was no "promotes healthy whatever" it was like "this will make your skin younger and eliminate/prevent wrinkles and other signs of aging."

Then the quiet fast-talking guy said that none of their health claims have been reviewed by the FDA.

So that's where we are now. Everything is scams and nobody will do anything about it.

pesus

an hour ago

I agree with your point in general, but doesn't that disclaimer apply to any kind of supplement? As far as I know that sort of thing has been allowed for quite some time. For whatever reason the FDA allows for an almost completely unregulated vitamin/supplement industry.

jordanb

an hour ago

They used to be vague and not make specific claims because that wasn't allowed. They'd say "Vitamin K helps promote healthy eyes." They can't say "our chewable will cure your glaucoma. (claimhasnotbeenreviewedbytheFDA)"

But apparently they can do that now, or at least they are doing it.

dylan604

an hour ago

I don't see an end to any of it when the Grifter-in-chief is in office.

ok_dad

an hour ago

[flagged]

recursive

an hour ago

I mean maybe Trump also caused it but there's no way he's just an innocent bystander here.

ok_dad

an hour ago

Yes I already said that he’s bad, don’t roast me, I’m trying to use nuance here like we’re supposed to.

Mobius01

an hour ago

I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.

charcircuit

an hour ago

Every ad is staged like this. The whole point is to make as good of an ad for the product as possible.

Do you think in a food commercial the people eating the product are showing their genuine emotion? It's all acting.

Zambyte

34 minutes ago

This is like a food commercial where someone shows an extreme reaction to food that isn't the product they're selling, or acting like they're eating something that isn't food at all. There are laws regarding food advertising that require it to present the real food (though the presentation of it is usually way better).

realJared54

2 hours ago

null

N_Lens

2 hours ago

Are you for real-real, Jared? Tell me so!

mvdtnz

2 hours ago

I honestly can't tell if this is a joke or not.

maxbond

43 minutes ago

JavaScript can be tricky.

PearlRiver

an hour ago

An American company being corrupt, morally bankrupt and shady? It is practically a requirement these days.

peyton

an hour ago

Never thought I’d live to see the 五毛 come to Hacker News.

mh-

43 minutes ago

It's extremely disappointing to see where discourse has slipped to here. Have started looking for a "new HN" to have actual discussions on again.

polnurfer

an hour ago

Just like all the bots on this site, when you control the platform, you control the platform.