Polymarket gamblers threaten Israeli journalist over missile strike story

An Israeli journalist received threatening messages from users of the online prediction platform Polymarket after one of his reports, on a minor missile strike near Jerusalem, suddenly became the focus of an unresolved bet about the Israel-Iran conflict.

“After you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you,” said one message to the journalist, Emanuel Fabian.

Another said: “You have 90 minutes left to update the lie. If you do this, you will solve the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life … If you decide not to correct it, and leave the lie intact, you will discover enemies who will be willing to pay anything to make your life miserable.”

The messages to Fabian were shared with the Guardian.

Online prediction markets, once the haunt of a very-online fringe, are rapidly becoming a feature of modern warfare. Several timely bets laid this year suggest insiders may be using them to profit from secret information, such as Donald Trump’s plans to kidnap the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, or the timing of US-Israel attacks on Iran.

Polymarket, whose investors include a venture capital firm owned by Donald Trump Jr, has faced criticism and regulatory scrutiny over potentially facilitating war profiteering and insider trading.

This has not stopped Wall Street from embracing the company: its investors include the Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. The company is now marketing a sentiment analysis tool that may shape how larger markets make trades.

Fabian’s experience indicates that as well as potentially incentivising insiders to profit from foreknowledge, online prediction markets may push non-insiders to try to forcibly rewrite the record.

The messages started soon after Fabian reported on a missile striking an open area near Jerusalem on 10 March. “It was a relatively unimportant update during the day,” said Fabian, a defence correspondent for the Times of Israel.

No one was injured in the strike. Fabian wrote a quick blogpost, including dashboard footage of the explosion that someone had sent him, and then moved on to another story.

The first email, later that day, asked him to change the story so that it would describe missile fragments hitting the earth after an interception, as opposed to a missile.

Fabian, who had checked the details with the military, declined. “I was very confused as to why anybody would really care. It doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, nobody was hurt.”

More messages followed, increasingly aggressive. Then Fabian started getting messages on X and realised that the accounts that were writing to him appeared to all be linked to Polymarket users.

He eventually found the specific wager, with more than $23m at stake: whether or not Iran would strike Israel on 10 March. A “strike” had to involve a bomb or a missile, non-intercepted, hitting Israeli soil. The people getting in touch with him stood to win if it was determined that a direct strike had not taken place.

“It all balanced on my inconsequential report. I thought for a second: should I change it and get these people off my back?” Fabian said.

He didn’t. The messages continued. One person wrote to him more than 100 times throughout the night, he said, trying to call him and threatening his family.

Fabian has not heard of any other journalists being threatened by Polymarket users. But what happened to him is familiar from other contexts – athletes, for example, are increasingly subject to abuse from online gamblers.

While threats against journalists are not new, Polymarket’s drive to monetise world events could have chaotic, outsize world consequences, according to Mark Roulston, a researcher focused on prediction markets at the University of Lancashire.

There are moral issues with incentivising users to bet on war. But there are also potentially grave issues with how Polymarket may increasingly offer anonymous online gamblers the ability to direct world events – especially as its markets are now shaping the trades of larger firms.

Roulston said: “I think one danger is some of these markets, the kinds of volumes they all have will be low enough that they will be more easy to manipulate. If the outcome of those markets or what those markets are predicting is being used then to trade more liquid, deeper liquid financial markets, you could imagine a situation where people set out to manipulate the prediction markets with the hope of then using that to manipulate the deeper markets where a lot more money can be made.”

Fabian predicted he would not be the last journalist to be subjected to pressure by online gamblers. “I think if Polymarket keeps growing the way it does, and Polymarket doesn’t change the way it works, I do not doubt other journalists will get contacted or harassed or even threatened.”

A Polymarket representative said: “Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter. This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves.”