The alleged insider bet of $400,000 by a Green Beret on a Venezuelan raid initially seemed like an isolated incident. However, a new report by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a nonprofit research organization, indicates that it might be just the tip of the iceberg. The report analyzed over 435,000 settled Polymarket contracts from January 2021 to mid-March 2026, totaling $54.4 billion in cumulative volume, and found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes achieve success rates that are difficult to attribute to skill or luck alone. 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, including military and defense as well as foreign affairs, are particularly challenging to forecast using publicly available information. This makes them more vulnerable to information asymmetries, including insider trading or specialized knowledge.
In these markets, the gap between informed and uninformed traders may be the widest, creating an environment where a small group can consistently outperform others, not just by reacting more quickly but by possessing more knowledge. Polymarket emphasizes its market surveillance teams and collaboration with the Department of Justice on the Venezuela case, stating that trading on confidential knowledge is prohibited on the platform, a policy also upheld by Kalshi. The report's findings add to a growing body of research pointing in the same direction. A working paper from the London Business School and Yale discovered that approximately 3% of traders are responsible for most price discovery on Polymarket.
Separate analysis by the blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs revealed that profits are even more concentrated, with less than 1% of wallets capturing about half of all gains. The ACDC report contributes to this discussion by suggesting a potential source of this edge. The report examines the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran as a case study, where Polymarket listed date-specific contracts on whether a strike would occur.
Markets tied to June 19 and June 20 expired without incident, with no longshot bets winning. The strike occurred at 18:40 ET on June 21, and in the hours leading up to it, 19 longshot bets totaling $164,292 were placed across the contracts that ultimately resolved to YES. Eight wallets shared about $1.8 million in profits, with one wallet taking nearly $500,000. The Pentagon designed the operation to be undetectable from the outside, using decoy bombers and long-range stealth aircraft to avoid detection.
Despite these efforts, a small number of traders placed large, well-timed bets on the outcome. This pattern is not limited to a single event; across Polymarket's military and defense category, the report found that in five of the six two-hour windows before market resolution, winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones, contrary to what market prices would suggest.
While longshot bets can outperform due to other factors such as mispricing or shifts in public expectations, the consistency of these patterns, especially in markets tied to military decisions, suggests that some participants may be operating with information advantages that others do not have. Unlike Solidus Labs, which recently analyzed Polymarket in a study that also serves as a marketing case for the platform it licenses to Kalshi, ACDC, being a nonprofit research group funded through the Fund for Constitutional Government, has no surveillance product to sell. The report recommends several measures, including identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on how detailed contracts can become.
The report concludes by calling for an evidence-informed debate about whether the public should be allowed to bet on these outcomes at all.