The FBI descended on the New York City home of Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan early Wednesday, rousing him from bed at 6 a.m. and demanding his electronic devices, according to reports.
The betting website had out-polled the polls to predict Donald Trump would win the presidential election, prompting Coplan, 26, and other crypto bros to decry the raid as politically motivated.
But the site, a so-called prediction market website that fields crypto-funded bets on the outcome of world events such as presidential elections, had been under scrutiny for months, according to reports. The raid was part of a Justice Department investigation into whether Polymarket had been allowing U.S. residents to use it, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday evening.
Doing so would violate a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in which the site agreed to stop offering its services to users based in the U.S. and paid a $1.4 million fine for operating without registration, The New York Times reported.
Polymarket nonetheless called the FBI’s motives into question.
“This is obvious political retribution by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for providing a market that correctly called the 2024 presidential election,” the company told several media outlets. “Polymarket is a fully transparent prediction market that helps everyday people better understand the events that matter most to them, including elections.”
In the weeks leading up to the election, Polymarket reported that users had bet $2.7 billion on the outcome and given Trump a 67% chance of winning, Fortune reported on Oct. 30. At the same time, researchers alleged the site was plagued by wash trading, a type of illegal market manipulation.
Coplan called the raid the Biden administration’s “ last-ditch effort to go after companies they deem to be associated with political opponents,” he wrote on X Wednesday. “We are deeply committed to being non-partisan, and today is no different, but the incumbents should do some self-reflecting and recognize that taking a more pro-business, pro-startup approach may be what would have changed their fate this election.”
Federal officials declined to comment on the raid.
Biden has promised and is delivering a peaceful transfer of power, in stark contrast to what transpired after Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump has sworn retribution against those he perceives as his political enemies, and seems bent on filling cabinet and other high-level federal positions with loyalists poised to carry out those plans.
