A Green Beret’s alleged $400,000 bet on an imminent raid in Venezuela felt like a shocking outlier — until a new dataset suggests it may be the tip of a much larger problem on Polymarket. Nonprofit research group the Anti‑Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) analyzed every settled Polymarket contract from January 2021 through mid‑March 2026 — more than 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume — and found a striking pattern: low‑probability “longshot” bets on military and defense outcomes win far more often than they should. Across political markets, longshots typically succeed about 14% of the time. In military-linked contracts, success rates in some cases topped 50%. “Markets tied to specific government policies, such as military and defense and foreign affairs, are harder to forecast using public information alone,” ACDC writes, making them “more susceptible to information asymmetries.” In plain terms: where decisions are made by small groups or hidden from public view, a few participants with better access to information — or with specialized, nonpublic knowledge — can consistently beat the market. Polymarket says it has surveillance teams and has cooperated with the Department of Justice in the Venezuela case. Trading on confidential knowledge is explicitly banned on the platform — as it is on rival Kalshi. Still, ACDC’s work joins a growing body of research suggesting an outsized advantage for a tiny share of traders on prediction markets. Academic and industry analyses converge on the concentration of influence. A working paper from London Business School and Yale found that roughly 3% of traders account for most price discovery on Polymarket. Blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs reported that fewer than 1% of wallets captured about half of all profits — a finding Solidus markets as part of the platform technology it licenses to Kalshi. ACDC’s report strengthens those results by pointing to where some of that edge may come from: markets reliant on nonpublic operational decisions. The report’s June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran is a detailed case study. Polymarket listed date‑specific contracts on whether strikes would occur. Markets resolving on June 19 and June 20 expired without incident; June 21 is when the strike actually happened, at 18:40 ET. In the hours before the strike, ACDC says, 19 longshot bets totaling $164,292 were placed across the contracts that ended up resolving YES. Eight wallets shared about $1.8 million in profits; one wallet reportedly took nearly $500,000. That outcome is notable because the Pentagon had specifically designed the operation to be unreadable from outside observers, using decoy bombers and long‑range stealth aircraft to avoid detection. Yet a small number of traders placed large, well‑timed wagers on the right outcome — a pattern ACDC found repeatedly. Across the military and defense category, in five of the six two‑hour windows before contract resolution, winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones — a distribution that runs counter to market prices and expectations. Longshot bets can succeed for benign reasons: mispricing, sudden shifts in public expectations, or skilled analysis of open‑source intelligence. But the frequency and concentration of the wins in military‑linked markets suggest information advantages that ordinary participants don’t have. ACDC is a nonprofit funded through the Fund for Constitutional Government and does not sell surveillance products. Its recommendations center on reducing information asymmetries and tightening market integrity: stronger identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, limits on markets whose outcomes are controlled by small decision‑making groups, and constraints on how granular contracts can be made. The report goes further, calling for “an evidence‑informed debate about whether the public should be betting on these outcomes at all.” For Polymarket and other prediction market operators, the findings raise acute policy and compliance questions. Should platforms permit betting on events decided by tiny, opaque teams? How aggressively can they police trading in real time, and how should they balance openness with the risk of insider abuse? For regulators, the concentration of profits and the potential for national‑security implications make the issue more than an industry ethics question. Whatever the next steps, ACDC’s analysis injects new data into a fast‑evolving debate about prediction markets, concentrated trading power, and the risks of monetizing outcomes rooted in secretive government action. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news