The alleged insider trading incident involving a Green Beret's $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) has uncovered evidence of unusually high win rates for low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes on Polymarket. The analysis of over 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume from January 2021 to mid-March 2026 found that success rates for these bets have topped 50% in some cases, significantly higher than the 14% average for similar bets across political markets. This suggests that some traders may be operating with information advantages that others do not have, potentially due to insider trading or specialized knowledge.
The report's findings add to a growing body of research pointing to a small group of traders consistently outperforming the market, with roughly 3% of traders accounting for most price discovery and fewer 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, finding that a small number of traders placed large, well-timed bets on the outcome, despite the Pentagon's efforts to keep the operation secret.
The pattern extends beyond a single event, with winning longshot bets outnumbering losing ones in five of the six two-hour windows before market resolution across Polymarket's military and defense category. The report recommends 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. Ultimately, the report calls for an evidence-informed debate about whether the public should be betting on these outcomes at all.