In August's episode of Show & Tell, Wall Street Journal reporters Caitlin Ostroff and Neil Mehta walked us through their investigation – conducted with Katherine Long and Brenna T. Smith – into the buzzy prediction market Polymarket.
The WSJ investigation found that Polymarket had created doppelganger websites like “poiymarket.com” where creators could fabricate trades in order to make it seem like they’d won big. Then they’d film a video where they represented the fake trade as real.
What started as a data journalism story investigating trades on Polymarket’s blockchain morphed into a story about shady marketing practices with multiple layers of deception. Along with uncovering that creators were paid to promote fake payouts, the reporters discovered that a firm called Virality ran a clipping campaign to promote the content to a US audience (contravening rules that prohibit the main Polymarket operation from having US clients.)
You can watch the episode above or on our YouTube channel.
In the "Show" section of the episode, Caitlin walked us through the data that’s available to researchers investigating Polymarket, including its API and third-party tools like Dune Analytics. (Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal; the reporters only used public data for their analysis.) Kalshi, Polymarket’s main competitor, also has an API but it is more limited in the data it provides.
In the lightning round, Caitlin told us that she finds WhitePages “really underrated” as a tool for investigators, while Neil mourned the loss of Google Plus as a “treasure trove” for linking social accounts to Google accounts. (Caitlin also shared her recipe for a peach pie bar, which she stress-baked after submission of the article.)
About Show & Tell
Show & Tell is a monthly podcast hosted by Indicator co-founders Alexios Mantzarlis and Craig Silverman.
We talk about digital investigations with leading journalists, OSINT investigators, threat analysts, and trust and safety researchers. We aim to be as practical as possible by having our guests walk us through one or more investigations or analyses they actually worked on.
This is our seventh episode. Our previous episodes featured:
Hal Triedman, a privacy and security researcher at Cornell Tech.
Omer Benjakob, disinformation and cyber reporter for Haaretz.
Barbara Marcolini, visual investigator with Amnesty International's Evidence Lab.
Kolina Koltai, senior researcher and trainer at Bellingcat.
Clara Jiménez Cruz, CEO of Maldita.es.
Jeff Horwitz, investigative reporter for Reuters.
We hope you enjoy and learn from the conversation with Caitlin and Neil. Catch every episode by subscribing to our YouTube channel. We're also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Have a suggestion for who we should feature next? Email us.
