Prediction markets are often promoted as truth machines, but a new WIRED investigation shows how easily they can be gamed. Two election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform generated more than $600 million in trading volume, with most of the money flowing through contracts on long-shot candidates who never came close to winning. In Ethiopia’s market, for example, only $173,000 was wagered on the actual winner, while over $41 million traded on the prime minister’s chief of staff. Nearly $285 million of the volume came from pairs of accounts repeatedly buying and selling with each other.
Experts say the pattern is a classic sign of wash trading, a banned form of market manipulation that creates the illusion of activity. Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economics professor, called it “obviously some form of volume manipulation,” and his algorithm flagged 99.6 percent of volume in a related Romanian market as suspicious. Polymarket says it investigated and blocked the accounts, but did not explain why they were allowed to trade so heavily before action was taken.
The likely motive, according to forensic firm MSR Decode, is “activity farming” — artificially inflating trading volume in hopes of receiving a future cryptocurrency token. Polymarket’s chief marketing officer said in 2025 that “there would be a token,” and similar airdrop farming is common in crypto. Because trader identities are unknown, uncertainty remains, but the evidence points to coordinated manipulation rather than genuine market interest.