Polymarket paid influencers over $350K to promote betting odds on X without disclosure

Polymarket’s chief marketing officer used his personal PayPal account to pay more than two dozen social media influencers to promote the prediction market platform on X. Most of those posts never disclosed they were paid advertisements.

A POLITICO investigation published on June 5 found that Matthew Modabber sent over $2.5 million to more than 800 recipients between January 2025 and February 2026. At least $350,000 of that went directly to roughly two dozen influencers and content creators tasked with making Polymarket odds look like organic, newsworthy content.

The mechanics of a covert marketing machine

The influencer operation generated approximately 490 social media posts across X, according to the investigation. The posts followed a recognizable playbook: frame mundane shifts in prediction market odds as urgent developments, often stamped with words like “BREAKING” or “NEW.”

Among the influencers identified in the investigation were Nick Shirley, Riley Gaines, Brian Krassenstein, and Alex LoRusso. Each posted content highlighting Polymarket odds to their respective followings on X, contributing to the platform’s growing visibility in mainstream political discourse.

Modabber’s account was reportedly linked to an email associated with a salad shop he co-founded.

This isn’t Polymarket’s first rodeo

Back in November 2024, a separate investigation revealed that another Polymarket executive had been reaching out to US-based influencers to promote election-related betting content. That effort was notable because Polymarket has long maintained that its platform restricts participation from US users, making the recruitment of American influencers to drive American engagement a particularly awkward look.

The 2025-2026 campaign appears to be a scaled-up version of those earlier efforts. Where the 2024 outreach was more exploratory, the Modabber operation involved structured payments, hundreds of recipients, and a systematic content pipeline producing hundreds of posts over roughly 13 months.

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