A Green Beret’s alleged $400,000 insider bet on a raid in Venezuela seemed like an isolated breach. A new report suggests it may be the visible edge of something wider.
The Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), a nonprofit research group, analyzed all settled Polymarket contracts from January 2021 to mid-March 2026 — more than 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume — and found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes win at odds that are tough or lucky.
Across political markets, such “longshot” bets typically succeed about 14% of the time. In military-related contracts, success rates have topped 50% in some cases.
“Markets linked to specific government policies, such as military and defense and foreign affairs, are more difficult to predict using public information alone,” the authors wrote, making them “more susceptible to information asymmetries,” including insider trading or specialized knowledge.
In these markets, the gap between informed and uninformed traders can be the widest, creating conditions where a small group can consistently outperform, not just by reacting faster, but by knowing more.
For its part, Polymarket highlights its market surveillance teams and cooperation with the Department of Justice in the Venezuela case. Trading of confidential information is prohibited on the platform as it is on Kalshi.
Concentrated profit
The ACDC 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 found that around 3% of traders account for the majority of price discovery on Polymarket.
Separate analysis by blockchain research firm Solidus Labs found that profits are even more concentrated, with fewer than 1% of wallets capturing around half of all gains. ACDC’s contribution is to suggest where some of that edge might come from.
The report examines the US attack on Iran in June 2025 as a case study. Polymarket listed several date-specific contracts on whether a strike would occur. Markets attached to June 19 and June 20 expired without incident and no longshot bets won.
The strike came at 6:40 PM ET on June 21st. In the hours leading up to it, 19 longshot bets totaling $164,292 were placed across the contracts that ultimately resolved YES. Eight wallets shared about $1.8 million in profits, with one taking nearly $500,000.
The Pentagon had designed the operation to be unreadable from the outside, using decoy bombers and long-range stealth aircraft to avoid detection. Despite that, a small number of traders placed large, well-timed bets on the outcome.
The pattern extends beyond a single event. Across Polymarket’s military and defense category, the report found that in five of the six two-hour windows before market settlement, winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones, contrary to market prices.
Longshot bets can outperform for other reasons, including incorrect pricing or changes in public expectations. But the consistency of the patterns, especially in markets linked to military decisions, suggests that some participants can operate with informational advantages that others do not.
ACDC, a nonprofit research group funded through the Foundation for Constitutional Government, has no surveillance product to sell compared to Solidus Labs, whose own recent Polymarket analysis serves as a marketing case for the platform it licenses to Kalshi.
The ACDC’s recommendations include identity verification for players, conditional payouts on suspicious bets, restrictions on markets where outcomes are determined by small groups, and limits on how detailed contracts can be.
The report’s conclusion goes further, calling for “an evidence-informed debate about whether the public should bet on these findings at all.”
