Polymarket Fires Its CMO Right as the Scandal List Gets Too Long to Read in One Sitting

The New York Post reported Friday that Polymarket has fired chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber, who had held the job since 2024 and once described himself as the company's 11th employee. Polymarket has not commented, and it is genuinely unclear whether the firing has anything to do with the company's last several months, though the timing is not exactly subtle.

Those several months, for the record: a Wall Street Journal investigation found Polymarket paid college students to fake winning trades on camera, prompting two senators to call for a CFTC probe. More WSJ reporting in September uncovered scammers betting with stolen debit cards, which cost the company its U.S. compliance officer. New York City Council opened its own investigation into "deceptive and predatory" marketing across prediction markets, and on September 24, New York's governor and attorney general sued Polymarket outright, alleging it is running an unlicensed gambling operation. A Harvard study earlier this year flagged a suspiciously high win rate across 210,000 trades, worth roughly $143 million in anomalous profit.

Modabber also directed Polymarket's first midterm political ad campaign, with Kathryn Bigelow attached. Impressive resume, wrong year to need one. As brand strategist David Deal put it, Polymarket's problem has stopped being a marketing problem, which is exactly the kind of sentence that gets a CMO's phone taken away.

Source: Adweek

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →