A Green Beret’s alleged $400,000 bet on a raid in Venezuela seemed like an isolated infraction. A new report suggests it may be the visible edge of something broader.
The Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), a nonprofit research group, analyzed all of Polymarket’s settled contracts from January 2021 to mid-March 2026 (more than 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume) and found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes win at rates that are difficult to explain by skill or luck.
In political markets, these “longshot” bets typically succeed about 14% of the time. In contracts linked to the military, success rates have exceeded 50% in some cases.
“Markets tied to specific government policies, such as military, defense, and foreign affairs, are more difficult to forecast using only public information,” the authors wrote, making them “more susceptible to information asymmetries,” including the use of insider trading or specialized knowledge.
In those markets, the gap between informed and uninformed traders can be wider, creating conditions in which a small group can consistently achieve better results by not only reacting faster, but knowing more.
For its part, Polymarket promotes its market surveillance teams and its cooperation with the Department of Justice in the Venezuela case. Trading confidential knowledge is prohibited on the platform, as it is on Kalshi.
Concentrated benefits
The findings of the ACDC report add to a growing body of research that points in the same direction. A working paper from London Business School and Yale found that about 3% of traders account for the majority of price discovery on Polymarket.
A separate analysis from blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs showed that the profits are even more concentrated, with less than 1% of wallets capturing about half of all profits. ACDC’s contribution is to suggest where some of that advantage may come from.
The report examines the June 2025 US attacks on Iran as a case study. Polymarket listed several contracts with specific dates for whether a strike would occur. The markets linked to June 19 and 20 expired without incident and no risky bets were won.
The strike occurred at 6:40 p.m. ET on June 21. In the hours prior, 19 risky bets were placed for a total of $164,292 on contracts that ultimately resolved YES. Eight wallets shared around $1.8 million in profits, with one pocketing nearly $500,000.
The Pentagon had designed the operation to be unreadable from the outside, using decoy bombers and long-range stealth aircraft to avoid detection. Despite that, a small number of traders made large, timely bets on the outcome.
The pattern extends beyond a single event. Across Polymarket’s entire military and defense category, the report found that in five of the six two-hour periods before market resolution, winning bets outnumbered losers, contrary to what market prices imply.
Risky bets may outperform for other reasons, including pricing errors or changes in public expectations. But the consistency of the patterns, especially in markets tied to military decisions, suggests that some participants may be operating with information advantages that others do not have.
ACDC, being a nonprofit research group funded through the Fund for Constitutional Government, does not have any surveillance products to sell, compared to Solidus Labs, whose recent Polymarket analysis also serves as a marketing pitch for the platform it licenses Kalshi.
ACDC’s recommendations include identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious bets, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on how granular contracts can become.
The report’s conclusion goes further, calling for “an evidence-based debate about whether the public should bet on these results.”
