Polymarket's Rush to Grow Left a Door Wide Open for Fraudsters

28 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by fortran77

28 Comments

N_Lens

10 hours ago

Polymarket has fraudsters operating on it?! Good heavens, this is entirely unexpected!!

karmakurtisaani

9 hours ago

A bit lazy take, don't you think?

user

5 hours ago

[deleted]

N_Lens

4 hours ago

I don’t know mate. Seems like the last bastions of Western Civilization are porn, gambling and conspiracy theories. None of this sounds particularly effortful.

karmakurtisaani

2 hours ago

Yeah, our world is collapsing, but could we at least make good jokes about it?

user

3 hours ago

[deleted]

poulpy123

8 hours ago

The fraudster betting website has fraudsters. What a surprise

jmathai

10 hours ago

I wish we, as a society, would label companies which cause more harm than good as such.

ElProlactin

9 hours ago

A large swath of American society today sees a movie like Scarface as an inspirational biopic, not a modern Shakespearean tragedy.

Lots of especially younger people see unbridled ambition and rule-breaking as a virtue. Everything is about making money and if you're not the one getting it, or worse, you're the person being victimized, you're dumb and weak.

watwut

9 hours ago

I dont know if I would blame young people as much. Those are values of the generation before them. Literally represented by over 40 years old like Vance, Musk and well, the whole conservative establishement.

Young people are more open in expressing it (like with Tate), but underlying ideas are not new.

r_lee

7 hours ago

isn't that what society rewards though? everyone is supposed to be an entrepreneur and have a side hustle

ElProlactin

4 hours ago

Being enterprising has always been a virtue in the US, but historically, there have been limits to how far you would go to make a buck, and people that pushed past those limits would be scorned by the majority. So at the very least, people tried to pretend that they were honest and did "good business" even when they were shysters.

I'd argue it's different today. Social media in particular has convinced a whole generation of people that if you don't have a garage full of supercars by the age of 23, you're a loser, and that there's almost no activity too shameful to engage in publicly in pursuit of wealth.

lux-lux-lux

40 minutes ago

‘It’s different today.’ Buddy, the Me Decade was 50 years ago.

Cytobit

3 hours ago

That's exactly the problem. Any ideal/virtue can be violated as long as they are getting that bag.

fuzzfactor

9 hours ago

Well "Consumer Reports" already has its niche in product comparisons. As the name implies consumers are supposed to get the most out of their ratings.

How about "Producer Reports" where companies are evaluated on whether they actually produce anything of value first and foremost as a benchmark.

Completely separate from the financial data which is already well-covered elsewhere. Investors are already supposed to get the most out of the money angle.

But for any one product most people are neither consumers of the product nor investors in the company.

These are the vast majority who would benefit from better information on whether a company is worth having around, for everyone in general who is not an avid consumer nor investor.

That would probably be more helpful for "innocent bystanders" who want to better avoid being assimilated by forces they have no interest in but could end up quite costly anyway.

simonebrunozzi

8 hours ago

There is no easy way, as a society, to "label" certain wealth as obtained with illicit or unethical activities.

It would be... interesting? (and dangerous?) to be able to meet someone at a party, and have a notification such as "this dude earned a billion dollar by scamming people".

fortran77

12 hours ago

Morromist

11 hours ago

Thanks. These paragraphs are pretty damning:

"At one point, the processor rejected as fraudulent more than 80% of the deposits it was handling, a rate that far exceeded industry standards of roughly 1%. Polymarket employees quickly raised their concerns with Chief Executive Shayne Coplan, according to people familiar with the events.

The compliance team, those people recalled, was floored by Coplan’s response: Just keep growing and pay a fine if regulators ever find out."

At what point are you a casino and at what point are you just a utility for money laundering, insider betting, scams & fraud?

teravor

10 hours ago

    > Just keep growing and pay a fine if regulators ever find out.
it's unfortunate that they weren't able to get a lawyer with experience to comment on whether or not he is right.

would certainly be interesting to know if he does risk assessment under the table.

podocarp

10 hours ago

Gain wealth, forgetting all but self

yieldcrv

9 hours ago

the onchain version of polymarket seems better in this regard, but they should really address the UMA oracle gang and have some kind of appointment process for separate oracle systems

so both polymarket onchain and polymarket us have major issues, but separate issues

Frannky

10 hours ago

I do wonder why, like clockwork, there’s an article against prediction markets. I do wonder if the problem with them is that it creates an incentive to share the truth, or for very smart people to predict it, and for others to use the predictions as a valuable reference point. It would be interesting to track what is shared and how often to see if there are some patterns

estetlinus

10 hours ago

It’s a good thing writing about money laundering and gambling addiction, no? Smart people are only smart until they aren’t.

ElProlactin

10 hours ago

> I do wonder if the problem with them is that it creates an incentive to share the truth, or for very smart people to predict it....

You missed the obvious one: it creates a path for people with insider knowledge to monetize it at the expense of employers, institutions, etc.

The guy using his access to classified information to make a few hundred thousand bucks in a day is not interested in "sharing the truth" for the benefit of society.

lux-lux-lux

30 minutes ago

When I saw Ratsphere types pushing these kinds of markets years ago getting insider information was the primary selling point.

It’s not inherently stupid - I’d much rather that some lowly analyst sell out an impending stock hit for a few grand than well-positioned insiders soak the market for 10,000x that. There’s obvious moral hazards, though.

Terr_

9 hours ago

> monetize it at the expense of

Right, and I'd also like to preempt any apologetics trying to cloak it as socially-beneficial "information discovery."

Many of these betting/insider-trading scenarios are structured so that the information only becomes revealed at the same moment it becomes worthless. (In some cases, that's just a return to its default state.) Like the value of knowing the winning numbers from an expired lotto draw.

watwut

9 hours ago

They dont share the truth. People betting there are not "smart" they are gamblers and suckers. And theit guesses are not a valuable prediction points.

camillomiller

10 hours ago

Keep drinking that sweet sweet polymarket kool aid