An anonymous user got an almost two hundred thousand dollars payout from Polymarket on Saturday at 8:11 a.m., when Israelis were woken up by an alert that Israel and the US had struck Iran.
Polymarket is the world’s largest decentralized prediction market, allowing users to trade shares by betting on the outcomes of real-world events, such as politics, economics, and sports, with prices reflecting real-time, crowd-sourced probabilities.
It serves as a forecasting tool and often provides faster, more accurate information than traditional polls.
The user, nicknamed ‘magamyman’, bet on February 28 as the date of the attack a few weeks ago, while the site gave the attack only 17% chance. They could have just gotten lucky, but this attack isn’t their first successful bet on the fate of the Middle East.
A reservist, Y.D., from a sensitive unit in the Israeli Air Force, noticed that this gambler had changed their name after several very successful bets in the past, almost all on Israeli attack dates.
A profit of 2.5 million shekels
The gambler had a profit of 2.5 million shekels. They bet on the exact date of the Iranian attack in October 2024, as well as betting that it would not occur on any of the days around it.
After that, they changed their username, potentially to cover their tracks and avoid suspicion.
Investigations within the security establishment suggest that the date October 26, 2024, was set several days in advance, allowing a user with the information to place an accurate bet on the attack.
Magamyman also bet accurately on the question of invading Syria following the collapse of the Assad regime.
They could be a gambler with incredible luck, or a shockingly good analyst of the Israeli government’s actions, or someone enacting a form of political insider trading, where someone with non-public information is using it to their advantage and betting accurately on things that other people can’t know.
At this time, the Defense Ministry has not responded to the Israeli media’s request for comments.