Polymarket investigates suspicious trading on Israeli election market
Analytics firms flagged hundreds of new accounts making well-timed bets on Benjamin Netanyahu shortly before exit polls dropped, prompting a probe by the prediction market.
Polymarket has confirmed it is investigating suspicious trading patterns on markets tied to Israel's October 27 election and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's performance in it, Casino.org reports.
Hundreds of newly created accounts making first-time deposits on the blockchain ledger were flagged by the analytics firms Polysights and Bubblemaps shortly before polls closed on Tuesday. The accounts placed a series of well-timed trades that turned profitable once exit polls showed Netanyahu's Likud party outperforming earlier projections, with some accounts jointly netting over $100,000.
In Israel, exit polls are published the moment voting stations close at 10 p.m. local time in Jerusalem. Several of the flagged accounts were created less than an hour before that deadline.
One trader staked $14,000 on Netanyahu's bloc just 12 minutes before polls closed, then cashed out hours later for $42,000 once the market repriced on the exit-poll data.
Polysights described the shift on X, noting that odds of Netanyahu winning had risen more than 35 cents over two days and that its tools had detected "massive inflows of YES buys on fresh wallets" in the preceding 24 hours. The firm put potential payouts tied to those fresh, trading-history-free wallets at more than $700,000.
Polymarket's event market asking "Prime Minister of Israel after the next election?" has drawn more than $81.2 million in total trades, underscoring the scale of money at stake in a contest where exit-poll producers, election officials, party operatives monitoring polling stations, and internal polling firm staff could all plausibly have accessed nonpublic information ahead of the public.
Polymarket has not issued a public statement beyond confirming the investigation.
The episode adds to a run of controversies over information advantages on the platform. In April, the Department of Justice charged Army Special Forces Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke with using classified military intelligence to trade on the timing of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro's removal from power, allegedly turning $32,500 in trades into a $409,000 profit while involved in the operation to capture him.
A Google security engineer was charged by federal prosecutors in May over more than $1 million in fraudulent profits, generated by using insider knowledge to trade on markets tied to Google-related search outcomes. In September, authorities confirmed a separate DOJ investigation into a KPMG accountant accused of using nonpublic audit data to profit $22,000 from predicting earnings results at 18 publicly traded companies.