Polymarket Says Extraction Is Not Invasion, Refuses Payouts on Venezuela Bets

Words matter. How you describe an event may not necessarily always seem that important, but if you are betting on a prediction market about a specific thing transpiring in real life, you may want to double-check the fine print.

This is the bitter lesson many Polymarket users are walking away with after the platform said it would not be paying about $10.6 million worth of wagers related to the recent US military ops in Venezuela.

Polymarket Says Sending Military Personnel to a Foreign Country Is Not an Invasion

The reason? Polymarket disagreed that what happened was, in fact, an invasion, which was what the original market was predicated on. 

Polymarket even threw the legal book at dissenting customers, but linguistic minutiae is hardly a great marketing move, with money on the line. So, what happened? 

Polymarket was speculating – or rather let people speculate – whether the United States would invade Venezuela, and it more or less did when on Friday, January 2, Delta Force special ops landed in Caracas under the cover of artillery and long-range suppressive fire from multiple divisions of the military.

The team then captured President Maduro and his wife while sleeping at the Presidential Palace, escorted him to an amphibious boat, and sped him off to the United States. 

Polymarket argued that this does not constitute an invasion, but rather – “a snatch” or something along those lines. Essentially, for the market to be settled in favor of those who backed the likelihood of the event, there would have to be an officially recognized invasion.

Naturally, users vituperated online, heaping criticism on the platform and arguing that it was equivocating and interpreting events to suit it. 

All the while, some people were able to cash more than $400,000 off various bets tied to the Venezuela invasion. It is not clear if those winners would still be granted their money, and who has been affected by the market’s interpretation.