FBI seizes Polymarket CEO's phone, electronics | Hacker News Reader

FBI seizes Polymarket CEO's phone, electronics

nypost.com

45 pointselsewhen44 comments

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I wonder if it has anything to do with this:

"Polymarket Paid US Social Media Influencers for Election Content"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-05/polymarke...

I mean, in general, being headquartered in a country where your product is illegal is brazenly risky.

Amazing. Musk is famously anti-short selling, yet put millions against Kamala.

What does a political bet have to do with one selling company stock because they think the company will not continue to perform well in the market?

I don't care enough about Musk to know what his views on short selling are but him betting against Kamala is not remotely similar to short selling.

Betting "against" outcome A is absolutely no different than betting "for" outcome B when there are only 2 possible outcomes of the election, its entirely semantics.

And there is no unlimited downside to the bet like there (theoretically) is with short selling.

It probably has to do with that. They paid for election content, but did not encourage betting. It just looks like general marketing for a platform.

A more egregious example of paying for election content is the alleged scheme of a candidates paying for endorsements. To me that seems much more deceptive and fraudulent.

I fail to understand the issue.

Both parties offer huge financial incentive to different groups of people for ensuring their victory by voting. We have entire industries based around this.

Both candidates play to large corporations and benefactors, and money drives the election. It's part of why our election system is so broken.

How is a prediction market worse than this such that it requires legal intervention?

You don't understand the issue because there's pretty much zero information about "the issue." The CEO of Polymarket is under FBI investigation. That's it. That's all the information anyone has. There's nothing "to understand" at this particular moment.

Surely you understand that I'm speaking with respect to the information provided by the article's source, regardless of its veracity.

I can’t believe nypost hit pieces and propaganda are posted here. Article has no substance and goes completely off speculation.

If the raid was legal, then there will be a judge that signed off on the warrant. If nypost had any journalistic integrity, they would follow up on that except this is a celebrity tabloid at best.

I am not convinced that FBI raids require a judge to sign off. Only police raids would.

It seems more likely that this guy / this company did something shady and is trying to claim "political persecution" to distract attention from his actual misdeeds, than that the FBI is actually persecuting him, on behalf of the side that everyone universally acknowledges lost the election, a week after the election for running a website that correctly "predicted" they were going to lose. What would be the point of that?

Yep, almost certainly correct.

> Coplan was not provided any reason for the incident, but the source said they expect it is political retribution since Polymarket accurately predicted Trump’s win – not traditional polls.

> The government is likely trying to accuse Polymarket of market manipulation and rigging its polls in favor of Trump, the source said.

The tabloid is rage baiting here. Prediction markets are still borderline illegal, and even ones done under the scrutiny of regulators (like PredictIt) are constantly investigated and close to being shut down.

I could think of a number of large number of possible reasons that the FBI would want to raid an international, anonymous crypto-betting marketplace and almost none of them have to do with media pollsters (which are different than the private polls the campaigns ran, mind you!) convincing the FBI to raid the CEO. Especially considering the polls were not that far off and Trump won within the margin of error of the polling!

I don't understand what's all the fuss about gambling?! Yes, it's somewhat bad, yes it's somewhat addictive but if you want to live in a liberal democracy you need to tolerate such things....like we tolerate alcohol and cigarettes for example. Imo gambling is not akin to hard drugs, that it should be per se illegal.

The irony is that let's say Poker lobbyists have been sabotaging online poker for years saying that it is gambling and addictive and now 15 years later, more and more states are making it legal. The similar thing happened with sports betting which was made legal in 2018.

Allow businesses to blossom and then regulate it, not vice versa.

Wait until they find out about all the $TRUMP coins

Is this one of those actions that the Biden administration is trying to rush through before they leave office? To me as a taxpayer this feels like a waste of our resources. Why spend any effort on this instead of any number of other things, crimes with actual victims.

Just because he is a rich programmer, doesn't make breaking the law ok.

We do not have infinite resources. People wagering on answers to interesting questions is free speech as far as I’m concerned.

You have no clue why he's being investigated.

there are a lot of problems with what you said, but to list a few:

- the president doesn't directly control the fbi and i would argue that history shows the fbi is not particularly biased towards the democratic side of the ticket.

- the ny post is bordering on a tabloid - it's not good journalism, and if you look, this story is basically just being carried by crypto news sites and well-known tabloids like the post and the daily mail.

- what do you think is more likely - that they're cracking down on polymarket for "correctly guessing" the outcome of a 50/50 election? or maybe that the guy running a weird political bookmaker is engaged in some shady financial nonsense on the side?

the only source saying that this is related to their "correct guess of the election" is unnamed and says it's their speculation. there's no proof.

this is an occam's razor situation. the timing may be coincidental, but i would be shocked if the biden administration chose to enact its political vengeance on the ceo of a lottery site.

The FBI is an agency of the federal government and therefore under executive control, right?

As for timing - I would not be shocked because there have been so many articles detailing how the administration and various politicians or special interest groups are pushing to implement various last-minute actions before they lose power. Why would the administration have less authority or urgency in the case of this agency versus any other?

"history shows the fbi is not particularly biased towards the democratic side of the ticket."

Peter Strozk and his lover might disagree with you

This is one example in a sea of counter-examples.

Since 2015? You get the Comey divulging yes Clinton had sensitive emails (but not Clinton's SoS office prioritized access based on donations to hen's(1) charity as shown in those emails).

But a sea? I'd like to see...

(1)Gendered pronouns are usually nonsense. I've appropriated the Swede's in most of my writing because the gender of the person I'm pronouning is almost always irrelevant, as in this case)

Eric Adams would like a word.

I think that's a counter example. His problems with the FBI started after he had the temerity to call out the border madness.

It's a shame to see this kind of connecting-the-dots-in-a-movie-plot conspiracy thinking on HN.

> the president doesn't directly control the fbi

Mostly true. Until Trump swears in next year. He has promised to be a dictator, at least part time. And supreme court already ruled that nothing he does would illegal. As long as he claims it was it was done as an "official act".

> crimes with actual victims

If there is evidence of election interference, that would be very much a crime with victims.

Is free speech election interference now?

Election interference is just a scary phrase for plain old propaganda; back in the day it was radio, flyers, billboards and posters and nowadays it is internet ads and spam. Same old stuff.

The government is likely trying to accuse Polymarket of market manipulation and rigging its polls in favor of Trump, the source said.

That is ridiculous, like saying a betting website can rig a football game. I guess it's possible but an election? This feels like Lawfare.

My mind also went to lawfare, which there has been so much of from this administration and various states - not just concerning Trump but also Elon.

Why care about this website that very few people have even heard of? Because it was the one place that did not predict a very close election outcome? Nate Silver accused pollsters of herding given all of them were painting every race as a toss up, and this seems like a good alternative source of information.

> Why care about this website that very few people have even heard of?

Probably because there was credible belief of a criminal act, and probably not for the reasons that an unnamed source an NYPost article is conjecturing.

I would recommend not trusting an unnamed source's interpretation of another party's actions. They're not describing what they saw or what they know, they're describing what they think.

They didn't say Polymarket rigged the election, you interpreted that incorrectly.

Article specifically says Polymarket, quote taken directly from the article.

Yes, the source is claiming that the government is likely to accuse Polymarket of rigging their predictive analysis about the election ("polls" but apparently they don't actually poll), not the election itself.

If they are going with that theory they should also investigate the pollsters who put out suspiciously positive polls that seemed designed to drive enthusiasm for Harris the week before election. I'm thinking specifically of that infamous Iowa Selzer poll.

If a gambling site predicted winners fraudulently, and enouraged you to bet on them... that's fraud. It doesnt matter if you win or lose. Both predicting and taking those bets is begging for that conflict of interest to arise. This guy could go to prison.

> predicted winners fraudulently

How does someone do this fraudulently? Didn't they predict thing based on how people bet? Are you implying they faked the bets?

> and taking those bets

From my understanding they don't take bets, they match people who bet with each other.

Basically, it doesn't make any sense. Why did they wait until after the election?

One obvious reason being that if they did it before the election, it'd definitely be considered election interference. DOJ has a policy of not taking major enforcement action in the political sphere for some period before an election.

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