Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

pydry

The level of censorship in Israel right now is off the charts: https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/ I suspect the gambler probably would have won on the basis of what happened but lost on the basis of what the times reported.

fzil

Man the moral degradation is off the charts. Prediction markets are easily the worst things to grace the internet by far and its not even close.

seydor

Yep, far worse than cryptocurrency

epolanski

Prediction markets need to be banned globally ASAP, but it would've helped the article to bring proof of: - the emails - the whatsapp messages - the discord messages - the X messages Mind you, I'm not stating the journalist is lying or overblowing, in fact I suspect this is all more widespread than we think, but it's odd that the journalist puts emphasis on the sources of his information in the case of the missile, yet it's not about his direct threats, some of those public like X replies.

mpalmer

I truly don't know how you wake up, read this story with your morning coffee, and go to work at a company like this.

markus_zhang

The gambling market is really bringing out the worst of us.

fnands

Man, something like this is going to be a plot point in a movie/tv series soon. Could work in some crime procedural.

defly

FYI: In November, an ISW Analyst Manipulated the Situation in Myrnohrad to Rig Map Bets https://militarnyi.com/en/news/in-november-an-isw-analyst-ma...

carefulfungi

Athletes are also receiving death threats from gamblers. * https://www.npr.org/2025/11/13/nx-s1-5605561/college-athlete... ... and many, many other stories.

bitmasher9

I don’t understand how this isn’t an immediate open and shut case for the police, assuming certain facts are verified independently. At the point that you’re making death threats to strangers you should be removed from civil society.

voidUpdate

Does the "Continue without disabling" button on the adblock popup just not do anything for anyone else?

ajross

So, just to point it out: people don't get violent and criminal magically because they made a bet. They get violent and criminal to backstop a bet they can't cover . The story here isn't that horrible criminals are using Polymarket. It's that Polymarket bettors are overleveraged, and at the margin some of them turn to crime to avoid losing their shirts. We've all been looking around for the trigger for the market-crash-we-all-know-is-coming. Seems like "too much betting on a stupid war of choice" is just dumb enough to fit the timeline we've been trapped in. Very on-brand. In other news: I'm almost entirely out of volatiles in my own portfolio right now. Cash and bonds until this pops. Frankly the chances are that today will be the day[1] are about as high as they've ever been. [1] Trump, sigh, basically went on camera and capitulated, telling the world that there is no plan, the US doesn't have the capability to ensure trade through Hormuz and that Iran will deny access until Iran decides otherwise. Markets don't like uncertainty, but they really, really hate losing wars.

ratg13

One has to wonder if the people placing these bets didn’t have some plans of their own. A million dollars for a single bet is extremely high stakes.

bhouston

An additional complication is that both Iran and Israel are engaging in heavy censorship of news articles, obstensively to prevent the opposing side from getting intelligence/feedback on their missile strikes/other activities, but it is also definitely to control the narrative: https://www.972mag.com/israel-media-censorship-iran-war/ This could definitely affect key polymarket bets in the near term. I expect over the long term the truth will come out, but in the near term, it could be obscured.

caminante

Per HN policy, stop editorializing the headlines. Here's the actual headline: > Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story

logicallee

This part of the story stood out for me: >More emails arrived in my inbox. >“When will you update the article?” one was titled. The email had no text content, only an image — a screenshot of my initial interaction with Daniel. >Except it did not show my actual response to Daniel, but a fabricated message that I had not written. >“Hi Daniel, Thank you for noticing, I checked with the IDF Spokesperson and it was indeed intercepted. I sent it now for editing, it will be fixed shortly,” I supposedly wrote. (To be clear, I wrote no such thing.) this seems to be a main issue. Would it help journalists if emails were quotable by default and the first party email providers could verify specific quotations? This way this class of fraud, market manipulation, and fake news would disappear. I don't see why people wouldn't leave their responses as quotable when responding to journalists, for example, and journalists could also set their responses as quotable by default. What do you think, could this help this issue?

htrp

isn't this basically the crypto oracle problem?

iamacyborg

I wonder when/if this'll be banned like the mechanically similar binary options were in '18/19 (in Europe and the UK).

snowwrestler

Alan Kay had a great quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” A quote that many technologists and inventors have used as inspiration over the years as they create things. It looks a little less inspiring when applied to prediction markets. Because yeah, one way to win a bet is to bet on something you already know you can make happen. AKA insider trading. But even worse, another way to win a bet is to cajole / threaten / bribe someone into lying about what really happened. That’s the stakes in this story. And at that point, the social value of prediction markets has gone negative. You’ve no longer got a tool that helps predict reality, you’ve got a new way to reward people for lying about what is real and not real.

_wire_

When "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" is combined with crime it seems clear that betting on crime is acting as an accessory. A business facilitating betting on crime is a criminal enterprise, in the sense of RICO. Polymarket bets on war overshadow a more basic concern: War prosecuted by a unitary executive without the express consent of the governed is a criminal enterprise. Trading in such an enterprise is corrupt regardless of its mechanism. In a global society, the governed are a world-wide body politic, making war fundamentally a racket.