The alleged insider trading by a Green Beret, who made a $400,000 bet on a Venezuela raid, may be just the tip of the iceberg. A new report by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC) analyzed over 435,000 Polymarket contracts and $54.4 billion in volume from January 2021 to mid-March 2026. The findings suggest that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes have success rates that are difficult to explain by skill or luck alone, sometimes exceeding 50%.
The report highlights that markets tied to government policies, such as military and defense, are harder to predict using public information and are more susceptible to information asymmetries, including insider trading. This creates an environment where a small group of informed traders can consistently outperform others. The ACDC report adds to existing research indicating that roughly 3% of traders account for most price discovery on Polymarket, with fewer than 1% of wallets capturing about half of all gains. The study examines the June 2025 U.S.
strikes on Iran as a case study, finding that 19 longshot bets totaling $164,292 were placed in the hours leading up to the strike, with eight wallets sharing about $1.8 million in profits. The report suggests that some traders may have had an information advantage, as the operation was designed to be unreadable from the outside. The pattern of winning longshot bets extends beyond this single event, with the report finding that in five of the six two-hour windows before market resolution, winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones in Polymarket's military and defense category. The consistency of these patterns, particularly in markets tied to military decisions, implies that some participants may be operating with information advantages.
The ACDC recommends identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on contract granularity. Ultimately, the report calls for an evidence-informed debate on whether the public should be betting on these outcomes at all.