Polymarket’s soothsaying powers apparently didn’t foresee the platform getting hacked — again.
The controversial prediction market lost millions of dollars of its users’ money after hackers breached its defenses on the international version of its website on Thursday, forcing the company to temporarily suspend trading. According to the Wall Street Journal, some $2.6 million was stolen from around 700 traders.
Polymarket hasn’t confirmed how many users were affected by the hack, but told Wired that it will refund the lost money.
Notably, this isn’t the first major breach the company has suffered this year. In June, Polymarket admitted that a sophisticated phishing attack allowed hackers to inject malicious code into its website and siphon over $3.1 million from around a dozen Polymarket user wallets. Last year, there was also an alleged attempt to manipulate the final outcome of a bet on Ukraine’s mineral rights.
The cause of this latest security incident, according to the WSJ, is a flaw in DebugBear, a third-party website performance monitoring and debugging tool that Polymarket uses. Its website, at press time, is inaccessible and returns a DNS error.
On social media, Debugbear said that it had been “impacted by an ongoing security incident” and urged customers to remove its tool’s embed code from their websites. Polymarket, for its part, said on X that it had fixed an issue related to a third-party vendor and promised the traders who were impacted that they would be “made whole.”
Beyond repeatedly getting hacked, Polymarket has been rife with scams and insider trading. Last month, the WSJ reported that scammers were making accounts with stolen debit cards on its US platform and using them to place bets to effectively launder the money. The fraud was so prevalent that at one point a company that was processing debit card transactions for Polymarket flagged over 80 percent of its transactions as fraudulent. In all, the launderers attempted to make out with nearly $10 million.
More on prediction markets: “Prediction” Markets Were Comically Wrong About the Brazilian Election
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