Last June, a new Polymarket account with the name “ricosuave666” began betting thousands of dollars on specific questions regarding Israeli military strikes on Iran.
The gamble paid off. When Israel struck Iran in the early hours of June 13, ricosuave666 pocketed roughly $155,000 before going dormant for seven months. The account resurfaced in January 2026 to place new wagers — before analysts flagged its activity and it was promptly deleted.
Ricosuave666’s moves were among more than 210,000 suspicious Polymarket trades analyzed by researchers at Columbia Law School and the University of Haifa. The trades netted $143 million for the “informed” traders who made them, according to the researchers, whose findings were published this month.
The most suspicious trade made by ricosuave666 was only the 3,662nd-most unusual trade in the data, authors Joshua Mitts and Moran Ofir wrote. They said ricosuave666’s gains closely matched ill-gotten gains attributed to a person charged by Israeli authorities with using military secrets to trade.
The study, which analyzed most of Polymarket’s trades between 2024 and 2026, is the first to provide an estimate for the total amount won by suspicious accounts, whose activities are often flagged by market observers and traders on X and Discord chats.
The authors used five criteria relating to trade timing and amounts wagered to screen for accounts that made big, bullish bets shortly before news broke, though they acknowledged that their methods could have been over-inclusive or under-inclusive.
“We don’t have any reason to think that the unobserved relationships are cutting in one way or another,” Mitts, a Columbia Law School professor who has previously written about potential insider trading in equities markets, told Business Insider.
Mitts told Business Insider that he and Ofir generally used the term “informed” trading rather than “insider” trading because some of the biggest trades they flagged took place in markets where too many people influence the outcome for it to be rigged, like those related to Donald Trump’s 2024 election. “Informed” is a broader term that encompasses trades made by smart bettors as well as those with unfair advantages.
The study said the election bets were included with other “anomalous” bets because the authors didn’t want to be accused of massaging their methodology to get a particular outcome.
“We think there’s going to be a lot of regulatory attention. We see this as just the beginning of the conversation,” Mitts said.
No proof of insider trading
The authors said it’s possible that they flagged profitable trades that were part of a hedging strategy and offset by a loss in another wallet controlled by the same user. Still, they characterized the volume of suspicious trades they identified as a “conservative lower-bound estimate of anomalous profits.”
Harry Crane, a Rutgers statistics professor who has written about prediction markets and was not involved in the study, questioned its methodology. While the study ranked over 210,000 bets based on how unusual the bets were for the traders who made them and for the markets where they were made, the ranking of their “suspiciousness” was heavily skewed by profitability, rather than what ordinary people would consider suspicious, he told Business Insider.
“A winning bet is getting disproportionately more weight than a losing bet of the exact same type,” Crane said.
Most of the 20 most suspicious trades identified in the paper, accounting for about $16 million of the $143 million in profits reaped by flagged accounts, related to the 2024 election results. Others related to Federal Reserve decisions and sports match-ups, where manipulation is theoretically possible or insider information theoretically could have leaked.
Mitts said the plan was eventually to publish all the data used for the study.
“Prediction markets have outpaced the legal frameworks designed to govern them,” the authors wrote. “Our paper aims to provide the empirical grounding and legal analysis necessary to close that gap.”
Polymarket changed its policy
Prediction markets have been around for decades, initially as academic experiments and later as a tool popular with members of the so-called rationalist community. The general idea is highly accurate guesses about the future can emerge from a group of non-experts who put their money where their mouths are.
Some advocates for prediction markets see insiders cashing in as a feature, not a bug. Shayne Coplan, Polymarket’s founder, said last year that it’s “cool” that Polymarket “creates this financial incentive to divulge information to the market.”
Earlier this month, the company announced that it was banning trades by people with “stolen confidential information” and “illegal tips” as well as trades by people who can influence the outcomes of events they’re betting on.
It’s not clear how the company will enforce the prohibition when it doesn’t know who its users are. While the company has a regulated US subsidiary, that entity processes less than 10% of the volume of trades as the offshore exchange, which doesn’t collect users’ names or other identifying information beyond an email address.
It didn’t reply to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Kalshi announced earlier this year that it is seeking fines from two users who broke its rules, including a video editor for MrBeast who placed bets on what words would be said on shows before they were released.
Prediction markets grew slowly for years. In 2025, Kalshi grew rapidly after it began offering Americans the chance to bet on sports in a way it calls more fair than sportsbooks. Problem gambling experts are concerned that prediction markets pose similar risks to sportsbooks, however, and several states have sued Kalshi and other prediction markets, arguing that they amount to unlicensed casinos.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulator, fined Polymarket in 2022 and generally prevented prediction markets from offering many contracts until Trump took office last year.
Michael Selig, a Trump appointee who took the helm of the regulator last year, has been a vociferous advocate for such markets, and criticized the states for their crackdowns.
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