The Wall Street Journal reports that Polymarket staged fake wins on copycat websites.
Creators filmed themselves celebrating fabricated payouts…$100,00 here, a lucky break there.
Just a day in the life of a winner.
The real market: running on a public blockchain, showed those same bets would have lost.
Across 1,105 videos, roughly $1.9M in bets were shown. None of them were real. A marketing firm pushed the clips past 140 million views.
This isn’t just about a prediction market.
Polymarket is a symptom of the terminal stage of a disease that has infected every corner of the modern economy.
I’ve seen it in the secondary ticket market, where an industry tool studied itself and the industry to say, “Look at the value we create.”
If you know what to look for, you can see it at the World Cup where the spectacle is real, and every number is managed and massaged.
We’ve built an economy operating on the idea that you can and should extract as much value as possible before delivering anything.
Maybe you never deliver value.
The symptoms vary by industry. But the endpoint is always the same. The world can’t tell the difference between a functioning market and a stage-managed performance.
Three Stages
This disease has a progression. Each stage sets in, making the next one possible.
Each stage takes the organization further from the customer it claims to serve.
Stage One: The Avoidance Crutches
To extract at scale, you need to stop seeing people. Extraction requires dehumanization.
Three crutches make this possible. They are not confined to a single industry. They are standard operating system of the modern firm.
The K-shaped economy. The premier tier is thriving. The mass market is struggling.
“That’s the economy.”
This absolves the organization from responsibility. The customer who can’t afford the product isn’t a failure of pricing.
No.
The customer is a victim of market forces that are beyond anyone’s control.
We are taught to believe in the purchase path. We know where every transaction goes. The beginning and the end of the sale. The transaction can be traced from initial sale to final delivery.
The data is meticulous.
The insight…zero.
Any sale is a validation. Someone bought it. So…the price was right.
The customer who paid and didn’t come back is invisible. The family that chose a different option is invisible…and, irrelevant.
The model is always right because the model only counts what it wants to see.
These crutches are not analytical errors. They are an infrastructure of avoidance.
They give the organization permission to stop asking the one question that matters: what did the customer buy, experience, and receive?
And was it worth it?
Stage Two: The Casino
Once you’ve turned the customer into a number on a spreadsheet, the machine can be optimized.
Extraction can happen. No worries.
This is the stage many industries are in right now.
The product is real. The demand is real.
But…
Every condition surrounding the transaction is engineered to extract maximum price from every sale.
You make the promise of value…but do you deliver?!
Tough to say.
The World Cup has been a case study in this logic.
The matches have been great. The atmosphere has been strong. The celebration is genuine.
But the queue to buy on FIFA’s website can be 30 minutes long. The supply is deliberately constrained, released in controlled bursts to drive up pricing, fueling urgency.
The industry says, “Smart business.”
But…the truth is that the house always wins.
Some fans get a bargain at the last minute, a deal the premium buyer never sees.
The premium buyer paid full price. The lucky fan got a deal. Doesn’t matter.
The TV cameras get the spectacle. People get a story of outrageous prices, crazy atmospheres, and a party.
Most importantly, FIFA gets its money.
Before you write it off as just FIFA, just the World Cup…you see it in other places as well:
· SaaS auto-renewal traps.
· Airline drip pricing.
· Concert platinum ticketing.
The house wins.
This is the casino. The lights are real. The product is real. The odds are rigged. The house always wins.
Capturing market rates. Revenue maximization. The language of optimization masks the reality of extraction.
The customer pays the maximum. The value…tough to say. Many businesses stopped looking at the customer a long time ago.
Trust…not a consideration.
Buy the ticket. Take the ride.
Stage Three: The Fake Bet
Polymarket is what happens when the avoidance crutches become permanent.
The K-shaped economy alibi. The purchase path obsession. “Any sale is a good sale.”
These are all early warning signs.
The fake bet is the endpoint. The model that stops seeing people as customers eventually loses the ability to prove that they ever had customers.
When you can’t produce real evidence of success, you manufacture it.
Fake bets.
Fake wins.
Staged transactions promoted by paid creators who were told not to disclose payments.
Real markets showed the bets would have lost. The fake market…winning.
The extraction model, stripped of any truth, becomes pure performance.
Polymarket was caught. A Wall Street Journal investigation did the work.
But this isn’t a one off. The logic operates everywhere the extraction model has been running long enough to lose the ability to prove it’s working.
· NFT wash trading. The Bored Ape pump and dump. Creators selling assets back and forth to themselves to show a transaction trail to make the number on the screen look real.
· Earnings calls and adjusted EBITDA. Made up metrics used to report the health of a business. While the numbers that would tell you the true health of a business are hidden.
· Sellout streaks. Tickets distributed. The number announced is one thing. The story your eyes tell you is another.
· Secondary market listings. Pie in the sky listing prices. Transactions never happen. But the story is “demand is through the roof.”
· GDP as the measure of economic health. The number goes up. Government officials celebrate. Headlines trumpet. The lived experience of citizens is debt, no savings, and multiple jobs…just to keep their heads above water.
The fake bet isn’t always a fake transaction. It is any metric that an organization uses to show success…no matter what the truth of the matter really is.
That number likely has no relationship to a real customer.
Never forget “Community Adjusted EBITDA.”
Whatever.
The avoidance crutches become the foundation for a world where the evidence of success is manufactured because the real story is too painful to look at.
Now…the world can’t tell the difference between real and fake.
The Alternative
The State of Maryland just bought back the IP of the Preakness Stakes.
Churchill Downs Incorporated had acquired the intellectual property for $85 million.
The state said, “No so fast.” The governor used the state’s right of first refusal and matched the offer.
The Preakness will now be owned by the people of Maryland, not by a publicly traded corporation.
Governor Wes Moore said the decision “allows Maryland to share its horse racing destiny.”
Funding comes from revenue bonds, not general tax dollars.
In other words, the race belongs to the people and pays for itself.
This is what the opposite of extraction looks like. This is what the opposite of extraction sounds like.
The state saw an asset that belonged to its community, watched it being acquired by an out-of-state operator…and said, “No.”
The value will flow back to the people who built it. The value will flow back to the place the value is created.
The relationship will be reclaimed.
This is a fork. It isn’t theoretical. It is happening right now.
Maryland reclaimed the Preakness because the community mattered more than the check. The relationship wasn’t just something to be taken from…it was something to be built upon and nurtured.
That’s Maryland.
The tougher question is where are you letting extraction take over?
The Fork
There are two kinds of people here: Relationship Builders and Check Cashers.
The Check Casher asks, “What will the market bear?” They measure transaction value, sales volume, and use dynamic pricing to squeeze every cent out of a sale.
Worse, they treat the customer as a counterparty…or a mark.
The Check Casher doesn’t need to fake bets like Polymarket. They just need to avoid looking at the customer long enough to convince themselves that the model is working and this is the only way to do things.
The Relationship Builder is different. The Relationship Builder asks, “What promise are we making to our customer?”
A Relationship Builder measures lifetime value, conducts real market research, and treats each sale as part of the relationship.
The Relationship Builder makes money by earning trust, delivering value, and nurturing the connection.
Not spending it down by extracting every possible cent.
You know which posture you are in. But…if you want to be sure, ask yourself this question:
When we set our prices are we asking what will the market bear or what will the customer receive?
Ask the first one? I’ve created a diagnostic that shows you the gap between the customer’s reality and your pricing.
Ask the second? I’ve built a system to sustain your choice…grow it.
Start there.