Do you think Keir Starmer will still be in office by 31 May? 30 June? Maybe you think he’ll see the year out? Doomer or optimist, you could place a bet on your hunch and add to the £24m already staked on Starmer’s political longevity on Polymarket, “the world’s largest prediction market” – a platform where users bet against each other on the outcomes of real-world events.
Polymarket isn't just taking bets on British politics. In February, $529m was wagered on the timing of US and Israeli strikes on Iran. An anonymous account made $553,000 betting on the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, hours before it happened. A US soldier has been prosecuted for using classified intelligence to trade on the platform. Polymarket is backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Donald Trump Jr sits on its advisory board, and the owner of the New York Stock Exchange holds a 25% stake valued at $2bn. In the US, some lawmakers are furious. Senator Chris Murphy said: "It's insane this is legal. People around Trump are profiting off war and death."
Despite the millions being bet on UK events, the platform has no UK licence, no UK office, and no relationship with any UK regulator. Polymarket blocks users in the UK, as it does in the US and many other countries. But speculators have a simple workaround: a VPN to hide their location and a crypto wallet to hide their identity.
All of this – the war bets, the insider trading, the UK election markets – is processed through Amazon Web Services servers located in the UK, somewhere between Slough and London's Docklands. Its infrastructure sits on British soil. Yet not a single UK parliamentarian has raised the issue. According to Hansard, prediction markets have never been mentioned in the House of Commons.
When the Nerve asked the Gambling Commission a series of questions about UK usage of Polymarket, they declined to address any of them. Instead, they said it was the obligation of "operators in other jurisdictions" to ensure UK consumers can't access their platforms, and they referred us to a February 2026 blogpost which doesn’t name the unlicensed platform currently being accessed by UK users.
Anthony Pickles, a researcher at the University of Birmingham who has spent years studying gambling communities, says the UK authorities haven’t grasped the scale of what’s coming: “The ambition of these companies with the backing of the venture capital in the US is much larger than they're ready to kind of think about and regulate at this point."
Not all countries take this head-in-the-sand approach. In August 2025, the Australian Communications and Media Authority instructed internet service providers to block access to Polymarket, saying it breached gambling laws – a measure that, unlike Polymarket's own geoblocking, cannot be bypassed with a VPN. In April, Brazil followed suit when its telecoms regulator took 27 betting sites offline. The UK’s equivalent body is Ofcom. The Nerve asked Ofcom a number of questions about Polymarket – whether they had assessed if it could be regulated by the Online Safety Act, and whether they had discussed ISP-blocking with the Gambling Commission. They didn't answer any of our questions. Instead, they said: "The gambling industry is regulated by the Gambling Commission, and we'd recommend you get in touch with them."
Between them, the two UK regulators with the closest relevant powers have produced a blogpost, a referral to the other, and a suggestion that the unlicensed platform sort itself out.
The Rycroft Review on foreign financial interference in UK politics, published in March this year, has led to a moratorium – initially temporary – on crypto donations, recognising that cryptocurrencies can be a vehicle for untraceable foreign money entering UK politics. But the review's recommendations did not extend to crypto-settled prediction markets running anonymous bets on British elections. The same opaque financial channel the government identified as a threat to democracy remains entirely unregulated when it takes the form of a bet rather than a donation.
Professor Sarah Mills of Loughborough University, who sits on the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport college of experts, describes the UK's position as a "regulatory twilight zone”. "Whilst the Gambling Commission have stated they are monitoring developments closely," she says, "the thorny issue of VPNs and UK consumers accessing these existing sites illegally has been overlooked."
Professor Lorna Woods of the University of Essex, an expert on the Online Safety Act, says that it was not designed to capture platforms like Polymarket. Professor Kate Bedford of the University of Birmingham, a leading gambling law scholar, is blunt: the government’s 2023 gambling white paper, High Stakes: Gambling Reform for the Digital Age, "didn't address prediction markets sufficiently and this is without question a gap in the law”.
In the US, the response from lawmakers has been sharper. Last month, the Senate unanimously banned its own members and staff from trading on prediction markets. Polymarket’s rival Kalshi suspended and fined three congressional candidates for betting on their own races – one of them, Virginia Senate candidate Mark Moran, told NBC News he had placed the $100 bet "to call attention to the fact that an entire election can be bought”. Earlier this month, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called on the House and the White House to follow the Senate's lead: "The very possibility that a member's vote could be influenced by a bet is reason enough to slam this door shut."
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform, told the Nerve: "It is concerning that UK users can access these platforms, which are operating illegally and with no meaningful safeguards."
Insider trading, betting on Armageddon and a $82m payout
So what is this platform that no UK regulator will claim responsibility for?
Polymarket was founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan, a hoodie-wearing dropout from New York University. It's a so-called “prediction market” – users bet against each other on the outcomes of real-world events, and the platform takes a cut. Unlike a traditional bookmaker, you're not betting against the house. It entered the mainstream when $3.3bn was wagered on the 2024 US election. Monthly volume now exceeds $10bn.
In March, a market on nuclear detonation by the end of 2026 attracted $850,000 in bets and predicted a 24% chance of Armageddon before being pulled after a public outcry. The platform also ran a market on whether Nasa’s Artemis II would explode until protests led to its withdrawal too.
Other betting on death is permitted. During the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, it is alleged an Israeli pilot leaked classified details about airstrikes to a friend so they could bet on Polymarket. The prosecution claimed the pilot and his accomplice made $162,663. In his defence, the pilot said: “The entire Israeli air force is involved in gambling.”
A report by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective found that long-shot bets – wagers on unlikely outcomes – won 51.8% of the time in Polymarket's military markets, against a 14% baseline across the platform's political markets. Fewer than 1% of wallets captured roughly half of all profits.
"There have been a growing number of instances where, right before an event, prediction markets have seen a flurry of predictions or bets," says Mills. "That's given rise to accusations of insider trading or misuse of confidential information."
With so much money at stake, sometimes users try to bully the data. In March, Times of Israel journalist Emanuel Fabian received death threats from users demanding he alter his reporting on an Iranian missile strike near Beit Shemesh – because his coverage was affecting a $14m betting pool. Bettors fabricated screenshots of messages he never sent. Some offered him a cut of their winnings if he changed his reporting. Fabian's reporting was accurate. It was just inconvenient for people with millions riding on a different version of events.
In April, the US Department of Justice charged a soldier, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, with using classified military intelligence to trade on Polymarket, making over $400,000 on the timing of Trump's raid on Venezuela. He was caught only because Polymarket cooperated with US federal law enforcement. Meanwhile, Polymarket's chief executive, Coplan, has described insider trading as "sort of an inevitability" with "a lot of benefits”.
The platform rewards both information advantages and capital – and those with the most of either tend to win big. Most famously, a French user won $82m with a series of wagers on Trump placed across 11 different accounts. The mystery bettor, who had been a trader for several banks, commissioned his own polls from YouGov, which asked respondents who they thought their neighbours would vote for – revealing the "shy Trump voters" which got Trump, and the bet, over the line.
Last October, Trump outrider Nigel Farage was asked about prediction markets. "Let's play it. Let's play every game in town”, he said – a call that one of his aides, George Cottrell, has heeded with some success. In March, it was reported that the aristocratic banker, convicted fraudster and author of How to Launder Money had lost $550,000 making ill-judged Polymarket bets on whether the US would strike Iran by a certain date. The account associated with him also lost $125,000 speculating that Keir Starmer would be out of office by 28 February.
However, all told, the account is nearly $3.5m up. His biggest win was $13.3m on Trump winning in 2024 – which earned him “whale” status in the eyes of Polymarket users. Cottrell currently holds positions on JD Vance winning the 2028 Republican nomination and Marine Le Pen protégé Jordan Bardella becoming French president in 2027 – betting from Britain on the politics of two countries that have also tried to restrict access to the platform.
An analysis found that 70% of Polymarket traders have recorded losses, while 0.04% have captured 70% of profits
Synthetic truth, whales and money masquerading as evidence
These are not just colourful stories about gamblers and grifters. Prediction markets are changing how information works.
For a few days in early April, if you Googled for the latest updates on the strait of Hormuz, sitting alongside the news results from the Guardian and Reuters you would have found a link to Polymarket allowing you to bet on the exact number of ships allowed to pass through it. These odds were presented as news because Google's algorithm couldn't distinguish between betting markets and journalism: Polymarket creates new markets constantly about real-world news events and the titles of the markets resemble headlines.
As Gaming America's Colin Lynch stated, "it was the algorithm doing exactly what it is designed to do, and drawing the wrong conclusion for entirely logical reasons”.
Google called the strait of Hormuz inclusions an error and removed them. But today, if you Google "Next UK Prime Minister in 2026?" Polymarket is the second-placed search result.
Polymarket CEO and founder, Shayne Coplan. Photo: Getty
Elsewhere, the same conflation is deliberate. CNN and CNBC embed prediction-market odds in live broadcasts, Google Finance has partnered with Polymarket and its rival Kalshi, and Dow Jones has a licensing deal with Polymarket.
Prediction-market odds have been absorbed into the information infrastructure. As Lynch says, journalism reports what has happened, with verifiable sourcing, editorial accountability, and the ability to be corrected when wrong. “A betting market that aggregates financial positions has none of those properties.”
The problem isn't just that betting gets mistaken for news. It's that the odds themselves are less reliable than they look. Researchers at the University of Toronto have coined a term for what prediction markets do to information: "prediction laundering”. Their pre-print study describes how thousands of bets – some informed, some speculative, some placed to deliberately move the odds – get collapsed into a single percentage. That number looks like data. But there's no way to tell from looking at it whether it reflects the collective wisdom of a crowd or the financial clout of one wealthy player. The researchers call it a "synthetic truth" – a number that looks like data but carries no guarantee of what produced it. "Once I see a number attached to a possible outcome, it stops feeling like an opinion and more like real truth," one user told the researchers. "It doesn't matter who is betting or why."
Prediction-market proselytisers argue that the markets offer unrivalled access to the "wisdom of the crowds". Polymarket's CEO has claimed that the platform represents "the most accurate thing we have as mankind right now". Yet in November 2025, researchers at Columbia University published a study of two years of Polymarket blockchain data. They concluded that around 25% of trading volume was fake "wash trading" – users buying and selling contracts to themselves. This increased activity gives the fake appearance that thousands of real people are behind a price – the "crowd" in "wisdom of the crowd" is partly fictional.
And the real crowd isn't much wiser. A blockchain analysis of 1.7 million Polymarket addresses found that 70% of Polymarket traders have recorded losses, while only 0.04% have captured 70% of profits. That is, the "wisdom" is held by and benefits a tiny elite of users.
As investment banker Joachim Klement has argued in the Financial Times, thin political markets structurally favour wealthy bettors – odds reflect money, not crowd wisdom. A well-capitalised individual could move the price. That price gets reported as information – and the reporting shapes public perception.
This machinery played out during the 2024 US election. Swings and changes in Polymarket's odds began to be regularly reported in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune and the New York Times. Conventional polls showed Trump and Harris at level pegging, but Polymarket had Trump as the likely winner. Debate raged about whether the Polymarket audience – assumed to be mostly male, crypto-adjacent Tucker Carlson fans – wasn't as representative as polling companies' statistical models.
Once odds are treated as information, they can shape the outcomes they claim merely to forecast
Moreover, there were “whales” whose massive bets were copied by other users, distorting the market's predictions. What looks like democratic information is actually a wealth-driven signal – money masquerading as evidence, shaping narrative, potentially influencing how people vote.
In the 2021 London mayoral election, American crypto evangelist Brian Rose placed £20,000 on himself on Betfair, briefly making himself the third favourite candidate. He screenshotted the odds, displayed them on social media, and earned a Michael Crick interview and a profile in the Times. Money moved the odds, the odds became a story – but the story didn't become votes. Rose was eliminated in the first round with 1.2%. The reflexive loop generated attention but couldn't manufacture an outcome. The question is whether that holds when the money is larger, the platform is global, and the odds are broadcast on CNN.
This infrastructure for political influence and insider trading is built, endorsed and shaped by figures in Trump's orbit. The Trump administration dropped two Biden-initiated federal investigations into the platform. Trump's own social media company has announced plans to launch a prediction market of its own, Truth Predict. The regulator which is supposed to monitor prediction markets in the US, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has experienced a 24% cut in its workforce since Trump returned to office.
Pickles warns that the real danger may not be the markets themselves but their normalisation. Novelty political markets, he says, are "the smell of baked bread in the shop of gambling" – designed to draw people in and shift what feels acceptable to bet on. "Ever since the 1960s in the UK, there have been dedicated PR operatives for gambling companies, setting up novelty bets as a way of moving the Overton window on how we should think about gambling." His greatest concern is that prediction markets will be reclassified from gambling to financial instruments – weakening consumer protections and accelerating the merger of personal finance apps with betting platforms. "If we let that slip," he says, "we're in trouble."
The question isn't whether prediction markets will reach the UK. It's whether, by the time regulators notice, they'll still be called gambling at all.