FBI Seizes Polymarket CEO's Phone, Electronics After Betting Platform Predicts Trump Win (nypost.com)
- Reference: 0175466611
- News link: https://politics.slashdot.org/story/24/11/14/0056250/fbi-seizes-polymarket-ceos-phone-electronics-after-betting-platform-predicts-trump-win
- Source link: https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/business/fbi-seizes-polymarket-ceos-phone-electronics-after-betting-platform-predicts-trump-win-source/
Although no charges were filed, the raid has sparked controversy, with speculation of political retribution and concerns over potential market manipulation, as Polymarket faces scrutiny both in the U.S. and from French regulators. The New York Post reports:
> Coplan was not arrested and has not been charged, a Polymarket spokesperson told The Post on Wednesday evening. "Polymarket is a fully transparent prediction market that helps everyday people better understand the events that matter most to them, including elections," the rep said. "We charge no fees, take no trading positions, and allow observers from around the world to analyze all market data as a public good."
>
> Coplan posted on X after his run-in with the feds: "New phone, who dis?" Polymarket does not allow trading in the US, though bettors can bypass the ban by accessing the site through VPN. The FBI's investigation comes a week after Coplan said Polymarket is planning to return to the US. [...] In 2022, the online gambling platform was forced to pause its trading in the US and pay a $1.4 million penalty to settle charges with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it had failed to register with the agency. [In France, regulators are investigating Polymarket's compliance with national gambling laws, with concerns about unauthorized gambling activities within the country.]
A [3]Fortune report published a week before the election found widespread evidence of wash-trading on Polymarket. "Polymarket's Terms of Use expressly prohibit market manipulation," a Polymarket spokesperson told Fortune in a statement.
[1] https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/business/fbi-seizes-polymarket-ceos-phone-electronics-after-betting-platform-predicts-trump-win-source/
[2] https://politics.slashdot.org/story/24/11/06/0652209/trump-wins-us-presidency-for-second-time
[3] https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/10/30/polymarket-trump-election-crypto-wash-trading-researchers/
Interesting wording in that headline... (Score:5, Informative)
The charges stem from illegal betting, and have nothing to do with the election per se (although that site was heavily promoted on Twitter). Sure it was part of the betting, but it could have also been who Taylor Swift is going to marry. Illegal betting is illegal regardless of what's being bet upon.
Leave it to the rag called "NY Post" to create a sensationall headline for a nothingburger story.
Re: (Score:2)
Trump might not pardon if there's nothing in it for him. Is Giuliani going to get a pardon? Probably not, because Trump ignored those legal woes, didn't even mention Rudy during the campaign. Old friend, no longer useful, no longer worth bothering about...
Interesting wording: Wash trading (Score:3)
> The charges stem from illegal betting, and have nothing to do with the election per se
Illegal betting would be unlikely to interest the FBI; that would be a state crime, not a federal one.
But the article said there was "widespread evidence of wash-trading on Polymarket." So, the purported malfeasance that the FBI was looking into was probably money laundering.
(" [1]wash trading" [investopedia.com] would be when you buy and sell at the same time, so the transaction cancels out. Wash trades never make economic sense, but if you report only the income, not the expense, money that you got illegally can look like legal
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/washtrading.asp
Re: (Score:2)
...thinking about it a little more, the other reason you'd do wash trading is to manipulate the market-- buy a thousand shares at a penny, sell them to yourself for a dime, and you've pumped the price so you can dump other shares and profit. So that could be what the FBI was looking for.
That would also be a federal crime.
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> The charges stem from illegal betting, and have nothing to do with the election per se (although that site was heavily promoted on Twitter). Sure it was part of the betting, but it could have also been who Taylor Swift is going to marry. Illegal betting is illegal regardless of what's being bet upon.
What charges would those be?
"Coplan was not arrested and has not been charged, a Polymarket spokesperson told The Post on Wednesday evening."
In fact the nature of the betting matters very much for whether it is legal. A federal court [1]had ruled in September [axios.com] that prediction markets outside the scope of commodities (such as for elections) could not be regulated under the delegated authority of the CFTC.
Polymarket is also not based in the US and - unless they changed recently based on that ruling - has geobloc
[1] https://www.axios.com/2024/09/12/betting-elections-predictions-market-cftc-kalshi
Not the election results, US citizens betting (Score:5, Informative)
Polymarket deals in betting in US regulated markets, including betting amounts. Polymarket deals in crypto and never registered with identification information, betting limits, reporting, etc. to have US citizens betting. They knew this was almost certainly illegal and halted offering betting to US citizens in the US while allowing crypto bets regardless on theoretical ignorance of the source.
Now they get raided for allowing US citizens to bet in an unregulated market and cry foul about how it's political persecution before Trump takes office ( [1]after saying they'd allow US citizens back in when Trump takes office [cnbc.com]).
You can argue over whether or not such betting should be regulated. They fucked around and they found out, and judging by this raid, they almost certainly knew that US citizens were betting contrary to the law on Polymarket, and the FBI was aware of this and took the cell phone as evidence under probable cause/warrant.
Either Polymarket is vindicated or it isn't, they will have their day in court.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/07/polymarket-plans-to-return-to-the-us-founder-says-.html
Re: (Score:1)
Article I, Section 8, Clause 3
Re: (Score:2)
The commerce clause
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, I'd post as AC too if my comment was that stupid.
Got em' (Score:1)
They found the reason Trump won and swatted em'. Geniuses...
Couldn't he have predicted it? (Score:4, Funny)
> The FBI raided Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan's Manhattan apartment, seizing his phone and electronic devices.
After getting the election results right, you'd think he'd have been ready for this.
Re: (Score:2)
you'd think he'd have been ready for this.
Maybe he was? The news report says that he was raided Not that they found anything on him.
It's not like a CEO can hide from the FBI or prevent a raid if they're investigating you.
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Good point - guess he had to give them something to find.
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It's just like how the Psychic Friends didn't see their bankruptcy coming!
See, one way to not feed conspiracy trolls is (Score:2)
to not do shady shit for all to see in the first place. Cuz then any time you *do* need to take in some high profile suspect, there's no record of you having done politically motivated shit in the past that people can point to to diminish your credibility.
This is known as "maintaining public trust." And it is a continual effort. Too many people in to many positions of authority in too many important institutions seem to treat public trust as a license rather than as a responsibility.
This is almost always a
You don't ask someone for their phone (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the first thing they're going to do is delete any incriminating evidence. That's just common sense. And this has absolutely nothing to do with the election. But making it about the election will get a whole bunch of clicks and excitement.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are concerned about illegal betting, you seize servers and interrogate the engineers.
If you're a small-minded, petty, soon-to-be-unemployed group of bureaucrats, you stage a raid on the CEO. Just call this what it is: a last-ditch tantrum from the current administration.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're a small-minded, petty, soon-to-be-unemployed group of bureaucrats, you stage a raid on the CEO. Just call this what it is: a last-ditch tantrum from the current administration.
As opposed to the convicted felon who has stated he will use the power of big government to go after anyone who said a mean thing about him as well as anyone in the news media who reported his own words?
What I like about Trump voters (Score:2)
Is watching them slowly come to the realization that their next. You can really feel the desperation as they do things like Google what is a tariff? Or when it dawns on them they have friends and family that depend on aspects of the department of education or when they realize they know somebody who's a friend and is undocumented...
It's the same thing that happened with brexit where people thought cooler heads would prevail and that they could play edgy weirdo and vote for dangerous and stupid things.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder how many authoritarian-curious Trump voters are going to have pregnancy challenges in the next four years.
Re: What I like about Trump voters (Score:2)
It's the only way to grow the master race. Teen pregnancies.
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That does explain the bizarre elevation of Matt Gaetz...
Re: (Score:2)
He's the surrogate for Trump's friend, Epstein.
Re: (Score:2)
Or like the NY attorney general who boasted during her election campaign that she was "going after Trump" and then dutifully filed charges and convicted him in a jurisdiction where it would be almost impossible to get a fair trial. It'll get overturned on appeal, but it's the same lawfare that you're predicting Trump will take part in while the incumbent administration has been aggressively doing it to Trump and others. Classic thuggery....accuse your opponent of misdeeds that you're already perpetrating
Re: (Score:2)
Did you not watch the trial coverage? There was evidence, lots of it, and Trump wasn't even denying most of it and instead turning the trial into a platform to campaign during recess. What defendant spends an entire trial insulting the judge and the judge's family in the hopes that they get a better outcome? Prosecutors were looking into Trump long before the 2016 election cycle.
There was even a theory that the big reason he got into the race, suspecting that he would lose, was that it might give him leg
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if he ends up getting charged with anything, there's always asking Trump for a pardon. Maybe he'd actually do it, because you know, birds of a feather and all that.
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> Well, if he ends up getting charged with anything ...
Whether he is charged or not, his business has been disrupted and his life turned upside down.
The police have plenty of ways to punish people without bothering to charge them.
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> If you are concerned about illegal betting, you seize servers and interrogate the engineers.
> If you're a small-minded, petty, soon-to-be-unemployed group of bureaucrats, you stage a raid on the CEO. Just call this what it is: a last-ditch tantrum from the current administration.
Why wouldn't they do BOTH?
Inconvenience the CEO and hurt his business is how the petty would roll
If they're not going to be around, even better to "forget" where the servers were stored.
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Nah. The thing with the servers is that the FBI have probably tried to directly place a et and it failed, meaning that there will likely be no evidence that they are not blocking US IPs.
However if Americans are doing it via a VPN then whats interestsing to the FBI is if Polymarket execs are encouraging that or are aware of it and not intervening. THAT is likely what they are looking for.
No that's not what you do (Score:4, Insightful)
You seize the phone where the people have been talking about the illegal activity because that's the important evidence. It is much easier to show that evidence to a jury and have the jury understand the illegal activity than it is to try and explain server logs to a jury of people who barely understand how to turn a computer on...
Re: (Score:2)
What, you believe the lame excuse that it's political? That's what they all say, especially when the guy you support is big on pardoning felons.
Re: (Score:2)
You're a fucking moron. The literal fucking mountains of evidence that demonstrate that your assertion doesn't hold a drop of fucking water should be evidence enough in themselves, but sadly- we both know they will never be. I wish there were more to say about it, but there just isn't.
Fuck it. Why fight it. Go get some brawndo, let's water some fucking plants, Cletus.
Re:You don't ask someone for their phone (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, common sense would be that if your business is doing something that's illegal in the United States, you shouldn't be in the United States. Ideally, he wouldn't be in a country with an extradition treaty either, although those don't typically tend to be the nicest places to live.
If it's one thing life has taught me (Score:2, Insightful)
It's that people are stupid. Successful people are stupid. Everyone is fucking stupid. Including me. We are all fucking stupid and we do stupid things all the time thinking we can get away with it. Some of us get by on survivor bias and some of us don't.
This is why humanity needs to be a social species. We are dumb as a bag of rocks and we all need to work together to cover up each other's shortcomings and stupidity.
Unfortunately we've become obsessed with individuality lately and this sort of rugge