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The betting website Polymarket saw $529 million traded on bets predicting when the United States and Israel would conduct their first bombing campaign against Iran last week.
Six newly-created accounts on the site made a profit of over $1 million on their own, correctly predicting the first strike in the war would happen on February 28. The unusual activity on the site has prompted several critics to suggest that some of the bets were made by people with insider information about the attack — a disturbing new form of war profiteering in the digital age.
Polymarket also saw $31 million in bets relating to when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be removed from power. Other betting sites had similar wagers, including Kalshi, which saw $36 million in bet volume regarding when regime change might take place.
Khamenei was killed by joint U.S.-Israel operations over the weekend. Polymarket defended the premise of allowing users to bet on acts of war.
“The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society,” the website said on Saturday, adding “that ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times.”
The betting website further claimed that prediction markets give people most affected by events on the ground “the answers they needed in ways TV news” and social media couldn’t provide.
Notably, none of these bets provided answers regarding when people should shelter in place in real time, or where direct attacks were set to take place.The claim that bets such as these provide people with needed information is also questionable when the internet in Iran is highly regulated, or in the case of this past weekend, completely blacked out.
Making millions of dollars from bets on the start of a war — in which hundreds of people have already been killed, including children — is a grotesque endeavor, many observers have noted. Some lawmakers are calling for regulating the practice.
Rep. Mike Levin (D-California) panned the betting website over these types of transactions, and questioned whether profiteering of this sort — including for members of President Donald Trump’s own family — should be allowed.
“Reminder that Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board and his firm invested double-digit millions into the platform last year,” Levin wrote on X, adding, “the DOJ and CFTC both had active investigations into Polymarket that were dropped after Trump took office.”
“Prediction markets cannot be a vehicle for profiting off advance knowledge of military action. We need answers, transparency, and oversight,” Levin stated.
“It’s insane this is legal,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said. “People around Trump are profiting off war and death. I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.”
Murphy had similar qualms about “rigged markets” regarding bets on how long Trump’s State of the Union address would be, claiming at the time that “Trump’s inside circle KNOW THE ANSWER and can make a mint.”
As of Monday morning, Polymarket continues to host multiple betting options relating to the war in Iran open on its website, including “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30,” “When will a U.S.-Iran ceasefire happen,” bets on specific dates the U.S. or Israel will launch strikes on Iran, and bets on whether a full invasion of the country will happen by the end of this year.
Holding Trump accountable for his illegal war on Iran
The devastating American and Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Iranians, and the death toll continues to rise.
As independent media, what we do next matters a lot. It’s up to us to report the truth, demand accountability, and reckon with the consequences of U.S. militarism at this cataclysmic historical moment.
Trump may be an authoritarian, but he is not entirely invulnerable, nor are the elected officials who have given him pass after pass. We cannot let him believe for a second longer that he can get away with something this wildly illegal or recklessly dangerous without accountability.
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