There are 152 cryptocurrency wallets on Polymarket International that bet on US military operations with a 97.2% average win rate. They made $8 million collectively. They came out of nowhere, placed their bets, and — in many cases — vanished.
Researchers at the Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), a nonprofit specialising in illicit finance, call them “Orcas.” The name refers to the killer whale’s precision hunting tactics: appear, strike with deadly accuracy, disappear. The ACDC’s analysis, published Thursday and first reported by Reuters, is the most comprehensive look yet at what has been an open secret in prediction-market circles: Polymarket may be a live intelligence feed dressed up as a betting platform.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
ACDC analysts trawled through every settled market on Polymarket International up to 5 May 2026, hunting for “long-shot” wagers — bets of at least $2,500 placed within an hour on outcomes priced at 35% odds or lower. Think of these as the trades that only make sense if you already know the answer.
They found 556 wallets matching this pattern. Of those, 152 were concentrated specifically in military and defence markets: contracts asking whether the US would strike Iran, whether a particular target would be neutralised, whether a foreign head of state would survive the week. Those 152 wallets won at a rate of 97.2%. Across Polymarket’s military markets more broadly, long-shot bets win 52% of the time — already suspiciously high. The Orca wallets nearly doubled that.
The ACDC is careful to note that the blockchain data alone doesn’t prove who controls these accounts or where their information originates. Luck could explain a handful of wins. It cannot plausibly explain 97.2% across 152 separate wallets on markets where the outcomes are, by definition, not yet public.
Copycat Cascades
What makes the ACDC’s findings especially alarming isn’t the insider trading itself — it’s the amplification effect.
Because Polymarket International settles trades on a public blockchain, every Orca bet is visible in real time to anyone watching the chain. And people are watching. When an Orca wallet placed a large bet on US military action in Iran hours before the June 2025 strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, an automated trading bot immediately copied it with a $200,000 wager. A large human trader followed with $100,000. Similar cascades preceded the US-Israeli air strikes on Tehran this year.
“Most people vastly underestimate how observable unusual betting activity actually is on Polymarket,” ACDC co-founder David Szakonyi said. “It would be naive to think foreign intelligence agencies aren’t monitoring these markets.”
That’s the part that transforms a financial crimes story into a national security crisis. A corrupt soldier profiting from classified information is one thing. An adversary state’s signals intelligence division reading Polymarket as a real-time window into US military planning is quite another.
A Soldier, a Google Engineer, and a Pattern
The ACDC report lands in an environment already charged by two precedent-setting prosecutions. In April 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — the US regulator now pushing for formal jurisdiction over prediction markets — charged US Army service member Gannon Ken Van Dyke. Prosecutors alleged he used classified information about the January operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, buying more than 436,000 “Yes” contracts and generating $404,000 in profits. Van Dyke has pleaded not guilty.
Notably, Van Dyke isn’t even one of the 152 Orcas. He built his position too gradually for ACDC’s algorithm to flag him. The 152 wallets are, potentially, far more disciplined — and far more dangerous.
A month later, in May, the CFTC charged a Google software engineer for allegedly using confidential data about the company’s internal 2025 Year in Search rankings to trade 23 Polymarket contracts with near-perfect accuracy, generating approximately $1.2 million. Same platform, different secrets — same pattern.
What Polymarket Isn’t Saying
Polymarket declined to respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on ACDC’s findings, though it has previously stated it “strongly condemns insider trading and market abuse” and claims to have referred dozens of suspicious wallets to authorities. The platform has touted its public blockchain as a transparency feature. The ACDC sees that transparency as a two-edged sword: yes, the trades are auditable — but they’re auditable by foreign intelligence agencies too.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig pledged tougher enforcement in April, and the regulator has since moved on at least three insider-trading cases. The ACDC argues that case-by-case prosecution is insufficient when the underlying markets carry genuine national security risk. Its recommendations are blunt: mandatory identity verification for all traders; withheld payouts on suspicious positions pending investigation; and an outright ban on markets where non-public information is especially actionable — military operations first and foremost.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Polymarket was built on the premise that markets aggregate information better than experts. That premise is correct. What its founders apparently did not fully reckon with is that some of the best-informed market participants are people with security clearances — and that the moment their bets are visible on a public ledger, “aggregating information” becomes “broadcasting classified secrets.”
The $8 million made by 152 Orca wallets is almost beside the point. The question now is who else has been reading the order book.
