After covering an Iranian missile launch, a military journalist received death threats since his article prevented bettors from receiving a reward.
Prediction markets and their increasing role in turning political unrest, war, and death into gambling opportunities have come to light as a result of the occurrence.
Emanuel Fabian, a military reporter for the Times of Israel, found himself at the center of a harassment campaign after he wrote about an Iranian ballistic missile that struck near the town of Beit Shemesh on March 10.
Bettors on the platform Polymarket had money riding on whether Iran would carry out such a strike.
Under Polymarket’s rules, a missile that gets intercepted does not count as a qualifying event for a payout.
When a news report becomes a betting dispute
That distinction made Fabian a target. Multiple people sent him messages demanding he revise his article to say the missile had been intercepted.
One message warned him: “If you do not correct this… you are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer.” Other messages contained information about where he lives and details about his family. One person tried to bribe him.
The situation around Israel does not stop there. A single account on Polymarket, operating under the name “dududududu22,” holds $151,000 in bets that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be removed from office before the end of this month.
If that bet pays off, the position would be worth $3.8 million.
Netanyahu recently posted a video online to address and dismiss Iranian conspiracy theories circulating about his death. There are speculations that the video is AI-generated.
Critics say the problems go beyond individual bad actors and point to deeper flaws in how these platforms are built.
On Kalshi, a centralized platform, an internal team holds the power to decide how contracts are resolved, with no outside appeals process. Polymarket relies on a voting mechanism run by an entity called UMA.
According to analysts, the cost of obtaining sufficient power to influence settlement decisions is just roughly one-fifteenth of the entire amount of money at stake on the platform.
This mechanism is weighted by the number of tokens a participant possesses, which is a serious weakness.
Despite facing intense backlash previously regarding accusations of enabling war profiteering and insider trading, prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi continue to host and attract hundreds of millions in bets on geopolitical conflicts.
New laws, old loopholes
Lawmakers in the United States have taken notice. Five separate bills have been introduced in recent months, with some calling for a ban on prediction market contracts tied to war, terrorism, or death.
The push for regulation picked up after suspicions of insider trading surfaced. Representative Greg Casar of Texas, a Democrat, stated that on the day before the Iran war began, 150 accounts placed highly unusual bets on Polymarket that the war would start the following day.
Legal experts, however, say much of what lawmakers are proposing may already be covered under existing law.
The Commodity Exchange Act gives the Commodity Futures Trading Commission authority to remove contracts from the market if they go against the public interest, including those linked to war.
The real problem, experts say, is enforcement. Even though Polymarket has established some presence in the United States, it continues to list contracts that are banned for American users on its international version.
Rutgers statistician Harry Crane has pointed out that making more activities illegal may not stop people who are already leaking insider information to gain an edge.
For now, prediction markets continue to operate in a space where there is little to stop bettors from treating human suffering as a financial instrument, and where the people caught in the middle, like Fabian, bear a cost that no payout can cover.