The Invisible Game You Are Already Playing
How your scroll, your like, and your share became someone else’s tool — and how a few people are getting very rich from it
Something Strange Was Happening on the Internet
A small firm in Paris noticed something no one else was looking at. What they found made it onto CBS primetime television — and into a White House memo.
In a U.S. television programme called 60 Minutes — one of America’s most respected news shows — investigators aired a story that most people scrolled past. The headline sounded complicated: “Insider Trading on Prediction Markets.” But the real story underneath was far simpler, and far more disturbing, than the jargon suggested.
What was found were not problems with the betting platform itself — but with nine specific accounts that appeared to be deliberately exploiting it with secret information nobody else had access to. Here is what those nine accounts did:
accounts, all linked
U.S. military events
never wrong
so far
Nine online accounts — all anonymous, all connected to each other — made $2.4 million by correctly betting on whether the United States would bomb Iran, whether a general would be killed, and whether a ceasefire would happen. The accounts got it right 98% of the time. Not the platform. Not ordinary bettors. These nine specific, linked accounts — behaving in ways that strongly suggest they knew the answers before everyone else.
Imagine someone in your neighbourhood started correctly predicting cricket match results — not 60% of the time, not even 80%, but 98% of the time — always before the match began, always on the biggest matches, always betting large amounts. You wouldn’t call it luck. You’d ask: does this person know something the rest of us don’t?
That is exactly what two investigators at a small data firm in Paris asked. Their names: Nicolas Vaiman, the founder, and a man known only as “Deebs” — his head of investigations, who appeared on 60 Minutes with his face hidden and his voice disguised, because he was afraid of retaliation.
“This is like winning the lottery multiple times. Luck alone cannot explain the numbers.”— Deebs, Head of Investigations, Bubblemaps • CBS 60 Minutes, 2026
This episode is the beginning of a much larger story. But before we can understand what they found, we need to understand three things: what Polymarket is, what a blockchain is, and who Bubblemaps are. Each one is simpler than it sounds. Let’s take them one by one.
Polymarket: The World’s Biggest Betting Table for Real Events
Not football. Not horses. People bet real money on whether wars will happen, who will win elections, and whether world leaders will fall.
Polymarket is a website where anyone in the world can bet real money on whether something will happen. Not games or sports — actual world events. Things like:
Think of it like a massive game of satta — but instead of cricket, people bet on geopolitics. And instead of a bookie, the “odds” are set automatically by how many people are betting on each side. The more people betting YES, the higher the YES price goes.
Polymarket was founded in New York in 2020. By 2024 it was handling billions of dollars in bets. It runs on cryptocurrency — meaning it is accessible globally, and users are almost entirely anonymous. No real name required. Just a digital wallet.
The “Wisdom of Crowds”
The theory goes: if a million people, all betting their own money, all trying hard to be right — because they lose money if they’re wrong — then the collective result should be smarter than any single expert. And often it is. But this only works if everyone is betting based on public information. The moment someone bets based on secret information, the system breaks. It stops being collective wisdom. It becomes an unfair advantage.
And that is precisely what the investigators found evidence of. Someone was betting not on what they believed would happen — but on what they already knew was about to happen. Before the rest of the world found out.
The Blockchain: A Diary That Nobody Owns and Nobody Can Erase
This is what made the crime possible — and what made it possible to catch. The same technology that hides your name records everything you do, forever.
Every transaction on Polymarket is recorded on something called a blockchain. This word sounds technical, but the idea is extremely simple.
A blockchain is like a notebook that records every transaction ever made — but instead of one notebook, there are ten thousand identical copies of it, spread across computers all over the world. Nobody owns these computers. No single person controls the notebook. And — this is the key part — you cannot go back and change any page. Once something is written, it is written permanently, on all ten thousand copies, at once.
0000bc
Genesis
c32ae1
Bet: $200
f01d83
Bet: $50K
a9e056
Suspect ⚠
| What blockchain gives you | What blockchain takes away | The paradox |
|---|---|---|
| Anonymity — no real name needed | Privacy of your actions — everything you do is public | You are a ghost with a completely transparent footprint |
| No central authority — no bank or government controls it | No ability to “undo” or edit past records | Freedom from control comes with permanent accountability |
| Global access — anyone, anywhere can use it | Nothing is truly deleted — ever | The very tool used to hide becomes the tool used to detect |
This is the twist in our story: the nine accounts thought they were hiding. They used anonymous wallets, meaningless usernames, and routed money through multiple exchanges. But every single move they made was recorded permanently on the blockchain. Public. Forever. Readable by anyone who knows how to look.
That is where Bubblemaps comes in.
Bubblemaps: The Detectives Who Read Money Like a Map
A small firm in Paris built a tool that turns millions of anonymous transactions into visual patterns — revealing what the naked eye cannot see.
Bubblemaps is a data analytics firm based in Paris, France. Their job is to read blockchain data — those millions of anonymous transactions — and turn them into something a human can understand: a visual map.
Imagine you had a map of every phone call made in a city over one year. No names — just numbers calling other numbers. Now imagine you zoomed out and looked at the pattern. Certain numbers call each other constantly, always at the same times, always for the same duration. You would know immediately: those numbers belong to the same group of people, even if you don’t know who they are. Bubblemaps does exactly this — but with money.
Each circle (bubble) is a wallet or topic cluster. The glowing lines are money flows or connections. When a group of bubbles all connect to each other and move together, it becomes visible as a “cluster” — just like the nine suspicious accounts appeared as one glowing mass in the middle of Polymarket’s data.
The head of investigations — “Deebs” — had been doing this work quietly for a long time. When he spotted the nine-wallet cluster, he described it as “the most insane pattern we have ever found on Polymarket.”
He was so concerned about the implications — and about who might want to silence him — that when CBS asked him to appear on television, he asked them to hide his face and disguise his voice.
The nine wallets had also placed a few small losing bets — worth only a few hundred dollars each. Bubblemaps believes these losses were deliberate. A strategy to look like normal, fallible bettors. To hide in plain sight. Even so, the overall win rate was 98%.
We do not yet know who these nine wallets belong to. They could be someone inside the U.S. government. A foreign intelligence operative. A private defence contractor. As of today, the identities remain unknown.
But the Bubblemaps story is just the tip. Because what enables all of this — what created the conditions for this kind of manipulation to flourish — is something much closer to your daily life. Your phone. Your feed. Your scroll.
How Social Media Became the Engine That Reshapes Elections and Public Reality
Before anyone can profit from a prediction market, someone has to move public opinion first. That is what social media does — often without anyone noticing it is happening.
Let us zoom out from the nine wallets and look at the bigger picture. Because the Polymarket story does not begin with a betting site. It begins much earlier — with how the world forms its opinions in the first place.
Twenty years ago, public opinion was shaped slowly. Newspapers, evening news, politicians’ speeches. Things moved at human speed. It took weeks for a narrative to shift. Today, public opinion can change overnight — or even within hours — because of how social media algorithms work.
The machine that decides what you see
Every time you open Instagram, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), or TikTok, a piece of software — called an algorithm — decides which content to show you. It is not random. It is designed to keep you on the app as long as possible. And it has learned, through billions of data points, that emotional content keeps people scrolling longer than calm content. Outrage, fear, excitement, tribal loyalty — these keep eyes on screens. Nuanced, balanced information does not.
This has profound consequences for politics. Here is the chain of events that now plays out around every major election or geopolitical event:
This cycle does not require a conspiracy for each individual event. The algorithm does most of the work automatically. All that is needed is someone who understands the cycle well enough to position themselves before the crowd reacts.
“Information is no longer just news. It has become a tradable asset — one that can be bought, sold, and profited from before the rest of the world catches on.”— The central insight of this investigation
And the most remarkable part? The millions of ordinary people scrolling, liking, sharing — they are not passive audiences. They are the raw material. They are the engine. Without knowing it, they are part of the machine.
The Innocent People: You, Me, and Everyone We Know
The most important character in this story is not the anonymous bettor. It is the ordinary person — scrolling, reacting, sharing — who unknowingly provides the data that powers the entire machine.
Here is the part of the story that is rarely told. Because when we talk about social media manipulation and prediction markets, we focus on the bad actors. The nine wallets. The insiders. The algorithm designers.
But the machine only runs because of you. And me. And our aunts, our friends, our colleagues. Ordinary people, going about our lives, doing what feels natural — and unknowingly feeding a system that is using us.
Meet some characters you might recognise:
None of these people did anything wrong. None of them are villains. But each action — forwarding, liking, sharing, reading odds — is a data point. And millions of those data points together create the signal that powerful actors use to move markets, shape opinions, and profit.
Each individual ant has no plan. It follows simple rules: go toward food, follow the scent trail. But millions of ants following simple rules together build extraordinary, complex structures. Your scroll, your like, your forward — these are your simple rules. You are not planning anything. But millions of you together, following your individual instincts, are building a structure that someone else designed. And that person is sitting far above, watching the colony, and profiting from its movements.
The algorithm is not neutral. It was designed by people — engineers, data scientists, advertising executives — to maximise one thing: time on platform. And the most effective way to keep people on platform is to trigger emotion. The most available emotion, in politics, is outrage and tribal loyalty.
So the algorithm was trained — accidentally and then deliberately — to serve more outrage. More fear. More us-versus-them. Not because anyone decided “let us make society angry.” But because angry people scroll more. Angry people share more. And shares mean advertising revenue. So the incentives aligned — and the machine optimised itself — toward division.
The algorithm was not built to manipulate elections. But it is perfectly shaped to be used by those who want to. Your innocent reaction is the raw material of someone else’s strategy.
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