It has probably happened to you: you open TikTok, Instagram or YouTube and a video appears of someone telling how they have won thousands of euros on an online betting platform. “I only put in 20 euros and now I have 3,000”, they say. Well, it turns out that, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, many of those videos are not what they seem. The platform Polymarket — a site where people bet money on whether something will happen or not, such as who will win the elections — has been paying content creators to record videos that look spontaneous, but are actually covert advertisements.
Polymarket works like a bookmaker, but instead of betting on football, you bet on real-life things: “Will bitcoin go up this month?”, “Will it rain tomorrow in Madrid?” or “Who will be the next president?”. The problem is that, to attract more people, the company has been using a fairly aggressive marketing strategy: paying influencers to make videos where they pretend to be getting rich with bets on the platform. The Wall Street Journal assures that the company has flooded social networks with this misleading content, without making it clear that it is paid advertising. Basically, they are making people believe that anyone can get rich overnight, when reality is very different.
This matters because it is not just a question of misleading advertising. Polymarket has already had problems with regulators in several countries — in fact, Spain blocked access to the platform a few weeks ago for not having a gambling licence — and this new scandal once again puts the spotlight on how betting platforms operate on the internet. For the average user, the lesson is clear: be wary of videos where someone claims to be getting rich fast with online betting. Behind those success stories there is almost always a marketing strategy, not a stroke of luck. And, as always, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
— Marta, for intermitente intelligence.
