A Polymarket analyst is convinced that someone involved in the administration of US President Donald Trump is behind a suspicious bet on a US invasion of Venezuela on the Polymarket service.
A Polymarket analyst is convinced that someone involved in the administration of US President Donald Trump is behind a suspicious bet on a US invasion of Venezuela on the Polymarket service.
Futurism, citing the Wall Street Journal, reports that an anonymous user on the «prediction market» Polymarket doubled his bet just five hours before more than 150 US aircraft attacked the capital of Caracas and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The US attacks killed at least 80 civilians and military personnel, fulfilling the terms of the anonymous player’s bet, which earned him $410,000.
The timing of the bet caught the eye — on January 2, between 8:38 p.m. and 9:58 p.m., a user bet over $20,000 on an imminent attack on Venezuelan territory. At 10:46 p.m., President Donald Trump issued the order for a military strike — less than an hour after the last bet was made.
At around 1:00 a.m. on January 3, explosions began to rock Caracas, destroying government buildings, residential buildings, and even the technical buildings of the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research. By 8:41 a.m. that morning, the trader had begun withdrawing his winnings—about $410,000. His account had only been created a week earlier.
Experts believe this is an incredible coincidence and suspect that an insider from the Trump administration or the US military who knew about the attacks in advance was involved in the bet.
«It was most likely an insider. That’s a lot of money to invest that amount without much news,» said Polymarket analyst Tre Upshaw.
Insider trading — placing profitable bets based on non-public information — is strictly regulated in the stock market, with serious penalties for violations. However, prediction markets like Polymarket currently find themselves in a «gray area.»
However, a bill has already been registered in the US that would punish all government officials in prediction markets for insider trading.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) was previously at the center of a scandal over a change to its map of the war in Ukraine, which became the basis for betting on the Polymarke platform. The incident, which occurred in November, forced ISW to admit to interference that could have affected the financial results of betting on the market.
Previously, the developers of the PolyGlobe map, which visualizes bets from Polymarket with geolocation, had unauthorizedly used the API of the Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState. In this way, they wanted to improve the visualization of bets on the capture of Ukrainian cities by the Russians.
