Polymarket Deploys Surveillance System to Police Election-Related Betting

Polymarket has begun actively investigating “dozens” of bets tied to the upcoming U.S. midterm elections. Its head of global intelligence and investigations, Shana Bautista, leads a 16-person team that monitors both the U.S.-regulated platform (which requires real-name registration) and the largely unregulated Polymarket International, where trades can be made anonymously with cryptocurrency. The effort has generated “hundreds of alerts a day,” prompting the company to refer at least two investigations to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

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Prediction-market platforms such as Polymarket and its chief rival Kalshi have surged in popularity over the past two years. In April, Kalshi barred and fined several political candidates from betting on themselves, and a month later NPR reported that campaign staffers had earned “thousands” by using insider polling data on platforms including Polymarket and PredictIt. Kalshi later announced its own election-surveillance system that blocks any campaign staffer listed by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from betting, though a staffer claimed to have circumvented the block in July.

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Bautista’s system aggregates “gigabytes” of data per user from social-media profiles, FEC filings, cryptocurrency exchanges, banking partners, statistical models and other public sources. When a user triggers a set of internally defined red-flag criteria—such as opening multiple accounts, rapid short-burst trades, or matching device IDs across wallets—the system sends an immediate phone alert to Bautista. She notes that the platform has been able to identify the potential actors behind each flagged activity.

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Bautista emphasized that insider trading and market manipulation are prohibited both by Polymarket’s terms of use and by law, warning that anyone who believes they can evade detection “will be found.” She declined to disclose specific detection thresholds, citing system security. The CFTC has so far taken a limited regulatory role, leaving most enforcement responsibilities to the platforms themselves.

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• “If you have information that you have a duty to protect, don't trade on it,” — Shana Bautista

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• “There's never been a case that we work where we haven't been able to identify, potentially, who these people are,” — Shana Bautista

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• “We're getting hundreds of alerts a day,” — Shana Bautista

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• “We're looking at threat vectors and risk areas that have existed for decades in traditional markets,” — Shana Bautista

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