The FBI on Wednesday raided the home of Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of the popular prediction betting market Polymarket.
It isn’t yet clear why agents entered the entrepreneur’s New York City apartment at 6 a.m. Wednesday morning, or whether Coplan or Polymarket are the targets of an investigation, Axios reported.
The FBI reportedly roused the tech founder from his bed and seized his electronic devices, according to an unnamed source close to the situation who spoke with the New York Post.
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The decentralized platform allows users to place bets on a wide array of future events, including weather patterns, economic indicators, and political outcomes.
It garnered mainstream attention in the run-up to the election for its odds predicting a Donald Trump victory—he was a 58 to 42 percent favorite on Polymarket a day before Election Day, CNN reported.
Although some say that Polymarket’s accurate prediction is the result of the collective wisdom of free-market bettors with an incentive to make money, the site also drew allegations of market manipulation.
Researchers told Fortune that there was evidence that many users of the platform were engaging in “wash trading”—when a single party repeatedly buys and sells an asset to inflate its value.
One French bettor, known only as “Théo,” reportedly saw a nearly $50 million payday from wagers placed on the presidential election, including that Trump would win the presidency, the popular vote, and all three “blue wall” swing states—all of which proved correct.
Théo told The Wall Street Journal that he was essentially betting against the accuracy of mainstream polls, which had the race at a deadlock before Trump’s decisive win.
Polymarket has denied any wrongdoing and suggested that the raid on its CEO was a politically motivated act of revenge.
“This is obvious political retribution by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for providing a market that correctly called the 2024 presidential election,” a spokesperson for Polymarket told Axios of the raid. “Polymarket is a fully transparent prediction market that helps everyday people better understand the events that matter most to them, including elections.”
Coplan, for his part, seemed unfazed by the raid, sharing a playful post to X later on Wednesday.
The entrepreneur, whose cellphone had been seized hours earlier, quipped, “new phone, who dis?”
Although Polymarket’s betting has not been available to Americans since 2022, Coplan said in the wake of the election that he was aiming to bring it back to the U.S.—which would be possible after an October court decision lifted a freeze on election betting.
“I want to give a lot of credit to the people who fought the battle to go and legalize political prediction markets in America,” Coplan said in a recent interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “Now we are in the position to be aggressive around expansion.”
