When far-right influencer Nick Shirley posted a viral video in January alleging fraud at Minnesota daycares, he showed his 1.6 million followers on X something else too: a gray hoodie emblazoned with the Polymarket logo.
Polymarket had made other appearances in the 24-year-old’s content, like in a series of man-on-the-street interviews about the “current state of America” posted in December.
The first post came after Shirley began receiving money from Polymarket’s chief marketing officer, Matthew Modabber. The second came after he had taken in a total of $3,100 from Modabber, according to records reviewed by POLITICO.
Modabber, who once wrote that the key to growth is “a product people can’t shut up about,” was putting his money where his mouth is. The Polymarket executive used a personal PayPal account to send at least $350,000 to Shirley and other content creators between January 2025 and February 2026, an analysis of the transactions shows.
That sum is almost certainly an undercount. Modabber used his personal PayPal account, which is registered to an email for a salad spot he cofounded, to send over $2.5 million to more than 800 people during the 14-month span, the analysis shows. POLITICO independently verified the identities of about two dozen content creators who received money from Modabber by using public records and analyzing their social media accounts.
At least 20 of the content creators identified by POLITICO promoted Polymarket on social media after they began receiving money from Modabber, according to payment records and POLITICO’s analysis of their social media activity. During the 14-month span reflected in the payment records, they posted about Polymarket at least 490 times on the social media platform X without clearly disclosing a paid partnership. The analysis of payment records and concurrent social posts highlights the company’s under-the-radar campaign to generate buzz in the political world around the highly controversial prediction market.
Among those paid: conservative influencer Alex LoRusso, progressive political commentator Brian Krassenstein, and Riley Gaines, a collegiate swimmer-turned-Fox News contributor who has campaigned against trans women competing in women’s sports.
The PayPal transaction records were shown to POLITICO by a person with access to the data. They were granted anonymity for fear of retribution.
A Polymarket spokesperson told POLITICO the partnerships with influencers were part of its standard business practices.
“We routinely collaborate with a diverse range of independent organizations, partners, and content creators spanning the political spectrum and constantly monitor, evaluate our progress, and make the necessary adjustments in order to achieve our core mission of providing the most accurate, transparent, and data-driven market insights to a global audience,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson declined to answer questions on the company’s strategy for partnering with influencers, its policies for disclosing those deals on social media, why Modabber used a personal account for the transactions, and whether the payments were reported as business expenses to the IRS.
Modabber did not respond to requests for comment.
Led by 28-year-old CEO Shayne Coplan, Polymarket has primarily functioned outside the US since Wall Street regulators banned it for operating without a license in 2022. But the company — which offers users the chance to bet on US elections, the Super Bowl, and even the Iran war — has seen its trading volumes skyrocket since President Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024, as prediction markets have entered the mainstream.
Trump’s administration faces mounting pressure to rein in prediction market platforms like Polymarket and its main competitor, Kalshi, over insider trading concerns. But the president, whose son Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket and a paid advisor to Kalshi, has taken a mostly laissez-faire approach. Trump’s administration dropped a pair of investigations into the company last summer, effectively clearing the way for Polymarket to re-enter the US market by acquiring a federally regulated exchange. Last week, he attacked several blue state leaders who have sought to regulate the platforms, saying it’s “critically important” the federal government takes the lead and that the companies “will thrive.”
As the policy debate over prediction markets plays out, Polymarket is harnessing influencers’ massive online audiences to turn itself into a household name. On X, the influencers trumpet claims about Polymarket’s accuracy, whether it’s predicting the outcome of the New York City mayoral election in 2025 or the exact date when a government shutdown would end — all while failing to mention the company’s role in bankrolling their posts. In many of their posts, Polymarket is framed as an authoritative source, and viewers may never realize they’re scrolling past sponsored content.
“People are not consciously thinking about whether an influencer is profiting every time they see a post,” said Renée DiResta, author of a book about social media propagandists, “Invisible Rulers,” and a Georgetown University professor who studies influence in the digital age.
The Federal Trade Commission says social media influencers have a responsibility to disclose any “material connection” to products they endorse, but the agency did not respond to questions about how those rules apply to posts about prediction markets.
None of the X posts made during the records’ 14-month timeframe included disclosures that they were part of paid promotions, POLITICO found. The platform rolled out the ability to label posts as paid promotions on March 1, though an X spokesperson said clear disclosures like “ad” or “sponsored” were always required in commercial posts.
“It sounds like this would be the type of thing that generally should be disclosed,” Robin Moore, former deputy general counsel for the FTC, said in an interview.
Kalshi has been known to partner with online content creators, too, underscoring the importance of social media to prediction market companies’ growth strategies. Last year, Kalshi hired a cryptocurrency influencer to lead its digital assets efforts, and it has partnered with social media influencers to boost its profile with sports fans and women.
“Everybody was either Polymarket or Kalshi,” said one social media influencer paid by Polymarket, who was granted anonymity because they feared retribution. “Kalshi and Polymarket, they literally at some point owned all big influencers.”
The influencer, who has hundreds of thousands of followers on X, said they received thousands of dollars from Polymarket to post about the company since 2024.
Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana declined to comment for this report.
‘Cannot be faked’
In May 2024, Shane Ginsberg asked passersby in Atlanta: “Trump or Biden?” All four people featured in the video he posted on his @shaneyyricch Instagram account expressed a preference for Trump in the upcoming presidential election against Joe Biden.
But the man-on-the-street-style interviews were not just about the election.
“I bet $5,000 on Trump to win the election,” Ginsberg tells one interviewee, as an image of Polymarket pops up on the screen. “Are you confident enough that he’ll win that you would bet?”
“Well, pull out your phone real quick,” Ginsberg responds, after the man says yes. “There’s a place called Polymarket. Polymarket.com. It’s the only place where you can bet on news, the election.”
Ginsberg was 19 at the time — old enough to vote in his first presidential election. And the self-proclaimed 8th-grade dropout had just started working with Polymarket to boost the company’s brand recognition, according to his website.
Ginsberg had started a social media marketing business called Street Poller, touting his ability to “dominate the scroll” by making videos of unscripted man-on-the-street interviews, then using a network of 50-plus content creators to boost their reach, as a Polymarket case study on his website describes it.
In some cases, Ginsberg’s fleet of interviewers didn’t even mention Polymarket. They simply wore the company’s logo on a T-shirt.
The timing couldn’t have been better.
Polymarket was paying social media influencers across the country to promote election betting in the months leading up to the presidential race. US bettors were still barred from placing wagers through Polymarket under the company’s 2022 settlement with federal regulators, but the influencers rarely mentioned that.
Ginsberg, who received at least $77,000 from Modabber over PayPal, did not respond to emails requesting comment on his work for Polymarket.
Asked about Modabber’s use of a personal PayPal account for what appear to be business transactions, a PayPal spokesperson declined to comment on specific accounts but referred POLITICO to a section of its user agreement that describes personal accounts as “primarily for personal, family, or household purposes.”
“If the activity associated with your personal account primarily involves business or commercial activity, PayPal may close your account unless you agree to cease the business or commercial activity or convert your personal account to a business,” the company’s agreement states.
In the lead-up to the election, when Polymarket users successfully wagered millions of dollars on Trump beating then-Vice President Kamala Harris to win a second term, the platform saw a surge in popularity. More than $1.5 billion traded hands on Polymarket’s wager that Trump would win, while more than $1 billion flowed behind Harris’ candidacy. One measure of monthly trading volumes on the company’s main platform jumped nearly 400% between September and October 2024, according to Dune Analytics, which tracks prediction market data.
The second Trump administration seemed to augur a friendlier regulatory environment for prediction markets after a Biden-era crackdown. Under Biden, the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were investigating whether Polymarket was continuing to accept bets from U.S. customers, in violation of the company’s 2022 settlement. Shortly after the 2024 election, FBI agents raided the Polymarket CEO’s New York City home — a step he painted as a “last-ditch effort” by the Biden administration “to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents.”
Trump’s return to the White House yielded plenty of possibilities to bet on. After Trump created the slash-and-burn DOGE initiative with an executive order in January 2025, Polymarket debuted a dashboard to track all the cuts.
Influencers spread the word on X, the social media platform known as Twitter before Tesla CEO — and DOGE leader — Elon Musk bought it in 2022.
Eric Daugherty, a conservative content creator who received at least $15,000 from Modabber, according to the records reviewed by POLITICO, announced the Department of Government Efficiency dashboard’s release to his 1 million followers as a “BREAKING” update on February 14, 2025.
Riley Gaines, who was paid at least $6,600, according to the records, shared the DOGE news with well over 1 million followers on X, opining: “This is awesome!”
Conservative media personality Elijah Schaffer, who received more than $8,400, wrote “Exciting news!” in a post last February, adding that the new dashboard would “be bookmarked for the next 4 years.”
None of these posts mention being paid by Polymarket or Modabber, though in a comment on his post, Schaffer said he is a “long term brand rep” for Polymarket. “I’m not paid for this post directly and they don’t force me to say anything so it’s technically not an ad. However I do clarify we work together,” he wrote.
Daugherty, Gaines, and Schaffer did not respond to emails requesting comment on their Polymarket partnerships and whether they were paid to post about the DOGE dashboard. Months after his DOGE post, Schaffer also said on X that he partnered with Polymarket and “made some pretty solid money.”
When Polymarket inked a partnership in June with xAI, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Musk, paid influencers again swooped in to hype the news. Eight of the roughly two dozen influencers reviewed by POLITICO posted about the partnership on the same day, all within hours of one another.
Dominick McGee, a conservative content creator who received at least $3,200 from Modabber and was once ranked by an analytics firm as the third-most-influential user on X, wrote: “X is about to change the game with this, and it’s honestly a match made in heaven.”
“Polymarket really took over, it feels like they have always been here,” McGee, who goes by Dom Lucre on social media, wrote in another X post about the collaboration several days later. Musk and spokespeople for xAI did not respond to requests for comment.
On McGee’s website, where he touts his “media influence” as someone “delivering unfiltered truth,” he says he charges at least $2,500 to comment on a social media post and upward of $15,000 to post a “breaking” or “developing” item. McGee did not respond to requests for comment.
Modabber also sent money to two people, Debbie D’Souza and Amjed Yacu, who have substantial online followings on the right — and ties to Trump’s administration — but do not appear to have posted about Polymarket on social media. D’Souza is the wife of conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, whom Trump pardoned in 2018 following a felony campaign finance conviction; she helped write and direct Dinesh D’Souza’s 2024 documentary “Vindicating Trump” and contributes to her husband’s self-titled podcast. Yacu serves as the Defense Department’s deputy digital director and runs a far-right Instagram account called Snowflake.Tears.
D’Souza, who netted at least $20,000 from Modabber, and Yacu, who received at least $850 prior to his employment with the administration, did not respond to requests for comment.
Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez said Yacu “currently maintains no active business partnerships related to his personal social media pages” — nor would he in the future as a Defense Department employee. Valdez declined to answer a follow-up question on whether Yacu held any business partnerships related to his personal social media accounts at any point during his employment with the department.
Last summer, Trump’s administration dropped the two investigations into Polymarket. The company proceeded to spend $112 million to acquire a licensed exchange and clearinghouse, putting it well on its way to a US comeback.
“The cultural relevance and brand recognition of Polymarket is something that cannot be faked,” one person posted on X in August 2025.
Modabber shared the post on his own X account, adding, “CANNOT BE FAKED.”
Obsessed with accuracy
When former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced off against democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in last year’s Democratic primary to become New York City’s mayor, content creators invoked Polymarket to gauge the odds of an upset.
Alexander Kaufman, a climate reporter who runs a Substack newsletter, received at least $1,200 from Moddaber. “Wild,” he wrote on X the day before the primary, including a screenshot of the platform’s trading volume on the race. “Polymarket finally has @ZohranKMamdani with pretty good odds of actually winning the primary against Andrew Cuomo.”
After Mamdani bested Cuomo to win the Democratic nomination, influencers posted about Polymarket as a kind of oracle.
Arash Azizi, a historian who writes about Iran for The Atlantic and received at least $3,000 from Moddaber, wrote in October 2025: “It’s fascinating how Polymarket numbers are a good guide for the direction of events. Before any polls, it saw the rise of Mamdani for instance!”
Neither Kauffman nor Azizi responded to requests for comment about whether they were paid to post about the mayoral election.
The paid influencers’ posts about Polymarket often drew attention to specific bets by framing betting odds as news developments. About a third of the more than 490 X posts identified by POLITICO characterized Polymarket’s odds for a given event as “BREAKING” or “NEW” updates.
They appear to be conscientious choices. The influencer, who was granted anonymity, told POLITICO that the company wrote posts for them to share on X and asked them to promote specific bets.
“They actually told us, ‘This one needs to get out now, this one needs to get out now,’ as if we were cattle,” the influencer said.
Moore, the former FTC official, said advertisers should include disclosures in any sample text they draft for their partners because they could be liable for what their endorsers say.
“As a general rule, if an endorsement is paid, the endorser needs to clearly and conspicuously disclose a material connection to the advertiser,” Moore said.
Polymarket and Kalshi have sought to cement themselves as authoritative sources on politics and current events, namely through partnerships with traditional media brands like CNN and Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal’s website now highlights a “Featured Prediction Market” from Polymarket.
Paid social media activity has been reinforcing that narrative for months, quietly sowing Polymarket’s legitimacy as it gears up for legislative battles.
As Brian Krassenstein, a progressive political commentator, put it in an October X post with no paid-promotion disclaimer: “It really is unbelievable how accurate Polymarket has been these last 9 months.”
Krassenstein, who received more than $9,300 from Modabber in the PayPal records reviewed by POLITICO, did not respond to requests for comment.
Over a two-week period in late December and early January, six influencers shared 10 posts on X about the Polymarket odds for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, facing criminal charges over allegations of day care fraud stemming from Nick Shirley’s viral videos. Later in January, six influencers posted about the odds of the US acquiring Greenland.
Alex LoRusso — a conservative influencer who received at least $18,750 from Modabber over PayPal, according to the records — was another avid X user who posted dozens of times about Polymarket without mentioning a sponsorship.
“Polymarket odds of a government shutdown are spiking with just under 10 hours to go before the deadline,” he wrote in September. “Democrats know exactly what they’re doing.”
Sometime after POLITICO reached out to LoRusso, asking if he was paid to make that post, a “paid partnership” label appeared at the bottom. LoRusso did not respond to requests for comment. Some — not all — of his Polymarket-related posts now bear that disclosure.
Sam Sutton contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on POLITICO and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.
