The Wall Street Journal has found that Polymarket covertly paid content creators to promote its prediction market exchange to American audiences, despite the platform operating under a CFTC consent order that explicitly bars it from offering event-based binary options contracts to U.S. users – a finding that layers a fresh marketing-conduct enforcement exposure onto an already extensively litigated regulatory record.
According to the WSJ investigation, Polymarket arranged payments to social media creators without requiring public disclosure that the promotion was sponsored, a practice that implicates both CFTC compliance obligations and FTC influencer disclosure rules simultaneously. The platform’s U.S. exchange remains off-limits to American users under the terms of a January 2022 settlement in which Polymarket paid a $1.4 million penalty and agreed to wind down all markets involving U.S. persons – making any deliberate promotional effort directed at that audience a potential violation of the consent order itself rather than merely a marketing regulation breach.
The methodological detail the WSJ documented is significant in enforcement terms. Prior reporting had already established that Polymarket engaged in a paid influencer campaign to amplify claims about its predictive accuracy, and that the platform posted what critics characterized as hundreds of false or misleading social media claims about that accuracy – a pattern that, taken alongside the newly reported undisclosed creator payments, suggests a sustained and structured approach to U.S.-facing promotion rather than isolated incidents. Legal analysts cited by CoinDesk have argued that for any platform operating under a CFTC sanction over U.S. access, refraining from advertising into the United States is now a baseline compliance expectation, not merely best practice, a standard the reported creator campaign appears to cut directly against.
The regulatory exposure created by the WSJ’s findings is compounded by Polymarket’s existing enforcement geography. A Nevada court has already issued an injunction blocking Polymarket from operating in the state, and 41 state attorneys general have argued that prediction markets of Polymarket’s type constitute illegal gambling under state law – a posture that makes undisclosed promotion to U.S. residents not merely a federal compliance matter but a potential trigger for state-level enforcement actions as well. The CFTC’s original 2022 order required more than payment of a penalty: it imposed an affirmative obligation to avoid offering contracts to U.S. persons, and regulators and legal commentators have consistently maintained that obligation extends to marketing conduct, not only the underlying product’s availability.
Polymarket’s broader legal trajectory had appeared to stabilize before the WSJ report landed. The DOJ closed its investigation into whether the platform had been effectively serving U.S. residents despite the ban – a probe that included an FBI raid on CEO Shayne Coplan’s Manhattan home in November 2024, during which agents seized his phone – and the CFTC separately closed its parallel inquiry. That resolution was followed by an investment from NYSE parent ICE that valued the company at approximately $9 billion. Whether the WSJ’s documented creator payments predate or postdate those closed investigations is a material question for any follow-on enforcement action, as conduct occurring after regulators formally closed a probe would carry a distinct wilfulness inference.
The pattern of covert promotion the WSJ identified at Polymarket is not unique to prediction markets. Regulators in the UK have documented the scale of undisclosed gambling promotion across social platforms, treating paid creator campaigns without adequate disclosure as a serious compliance failure in their own right. Polymarket had not issued a public response to the WSJ’s findings at the time of publication.
The open question enforcement observers are now tracking is whether the CFTC, DOJ, or FTC open follow-on proceedings specifically targeting Polymarket’s marketing and influencer practices – and whether evidence of deliberate U.S.-facing promotion is sufficient to reopen a consent-order enforcement posture that regulators had only recently, and quietly, stepped back from.
Source: Wall Street Journal via @WALLACHLEGAL on X
Renata Kovacs has spent the better part of a decade following the regulatory shifts and licensing battles that define how gambling markets open, close, and evolve across Europe and beyond. She came up through the legal and compliance side of the industry before shifting her focus to journalism and analysis, giving her a perspective that sits closer to the operator room than the press box. Her coverage tends to cut through the noise and get straight to what a regulatory change actually means for the businesses and players involved.