The alleged $400,000 insider bet by a Green Beret on a Venezuelan raid initially seemed like an isolated incident. However, a new report by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) suggests that this might be just the tip of the iceberg.
The nonprofit research group analyzed over 435,000 settled Polymarket contracts from January 2021 to mid-March 2026, with a cumulative volume of $54.4 billion, and found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes have surprisingly high win rates, which cannot be easily explained by skill or luck. Typically, such 'longshot' bets succeed around 14% of the time across political markets, but in military-linked contracts, success rates have reached as high as 50% in some cases.
The authors of the report noted that markets related to specific government policies, such as military and defense and foreign affairs, are particularly challenging to forecast using only public information, making them more vulnerable to information asymmetries, including insider trading or specialized knowledge. This creates an environment where a small group of traders can consistently outperform others, not just by reacting faster, but by having access to more information. Polymarket has emphasized its market surveillance teams and cooperation with the Department of Justice on the Venezuela case, stressing that trading on confidential knowledge is prohibited on the platform.
The ACDC report's findings contribute to a growing body of research pointing in the same direction. A working paper from London Business School and Yale found that roughly 3% of traders are responsible for most price discovery on Polymarket. Separate analysis by blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs showed that profits are highly concentrated, with less than 1% of wallets capturing about half of all gains.
The ACDC report examines the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran as a case study, where several date-specific contracts were listed on whether a strike would occur.
In the hours leading up to the strike, 19 longshot bets totaling $164,292 were placed across the contracts that ultimately resolved YES, with eight wallets sharing about $1.8 million in profits, and one taking nearly $500,000. Despite the Pentagon's efforts to keep the operation secret, a small number of traders placed large, well-timed bets on the outcome. The report found that across Polymarket's military and defense category, in five of the six two-hour windows before market resolution, winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones, contrary to what market prices imply. While longshot bets can outperform for other reasons, including mispricing or shifts in public expectations, the consistency of the patterns, especially in markets tied to military decisions, suggests that some participants may have information advantages that others do not.
The ACDC, being a nonprofit research group, has recommended measures such as identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on how granular contracts can become. The report concludes by calling for an evidence-informed debate about whether the public should be betting on these outcomes at all.