Polymarket Fires CMO Matthew Modabber After Probe Tied to $2.5M Influencer Payments

Board Ousts a Founder's Closest Lieutenant

Polymarket has dismissed chief marketing officer Matthew Modabber, ending a tenure that began in January 2024 and, with it, one of the company's most consequential personal alliances. The decision, detailed in a New York Post report published Thursday, followed an internal probe into episodes that had unsettled investors, including a promotional scheme built on fabricated trading results and paid influencer activity routed through personal accounts; people familiar with the matter said a separation agreement is being finalized. Modabber joined as the company's eleventh employee, built a marketing, partnerships and growth team of more than 50 people, and has claimed credit for lifting daily trading volume from roughly $300,000 to hundreds of millions of dollars. His exit was complicated by a friendship with chief executive Shayne Coplan that dates to their days together at Manhattan's Beacon School, a bond Modabber himself cited when he joined the company in 2024. According to people cited in the report, Coplan reacted furiously when lawyers pressed for the dismissal, at one point threatening to fire members of the legal team pursuing the case, before conceding that parting ways served the company. Coplan, 28, became the country's youngest billionaire, the report notes, after the platform's 2024 election odds were quoted nationwide. Polymarket's board, which seats Coplan, crypto investor Nick Tomaino, attorney Alex Spiro and a partner at Founders Fund, concluded in recent weeks that Modabber was obstructing the push to move the prediction market operator, a web3 venue where users bet on real-world outcomes, past its scrappy startup image as it weighs a potential IPO. The company has strengthened its risk, legal and finance teams this year amid external scrutiny of payment fraud and compliance issues, and an August restructuring had already trimmed his authority by installing a founder of scooter startup Bird over marketing.

Fake Trade Videos Draw CFTC Attention

The review that ended Modabber's run traces back to promotional campaigns that drew public scrutiny in June. One published analysis of more than 1,100 TikTok videos promoting the platform found that some clips showed trading profits inconsistent with actual market records. A widely shared example claimed a young bettor had turned $1,000 into $100,000 by wagering that Trump would say the word “McDonald’s”; the market's own records showed no such payoff. The same analysis calculated that 118 videos, which together portrayed participants as having earned close to $900,000, described trades that would have produced a combined loss of more than $166,000 at the recorded odds. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. agency that oversees derivatives and prediction markets, has been examining claims that Modabber's team built a mock webpage hosting videos of users purportedly profiting from fake trades; that inquiry remains open and no wrongdoing has been proven. The mock pages imitated Polymarket's own site to lend the clips credibility, per the June findings. A separate thread concerns money flows. A June investigation by Politico obtained transaction records showing that Modabber used a personal PayPal account, tied to an email connected to Salad House, an Italian salad restaurant brand he co-founded, to pay more than $2.5 million to over 800 people between January 2025 and February 2026, with at least $350,000 reaching identified content creators, some of whom did not clearly disclose their commercial relationship with Polymarket to audiences. Routing paid promotion through a personal account rather than company channels is part of what drew regulator and investor attention, since undisclosed marketing raises market-integrity questions for a venue whose core product is betting itself. The company said at the time it stood behind “accurate, fair, and transparent markets” and planned a full review of the promotional material.

This story is about more than one executive's departure: it shows the collision between founder loyalty and institutional discipline. A board that includes the CEO himself chose to remove his oldest professional ally after lawyers pressed the case, a decision most young crypto companies avoid until a listing forces it. The unresolved CFTC inquiry is the bigger overhang for a would-be public company: promotional profit claims that never matched market records are exactly the kind of conduct a regulator will want documented and closed before underwriters sign off. Until that happens, clips of improbable betting wins deserve the same DYOR scrutiny users apply to any trading pitch.