Polymarket Apologizes For Taking Bets On American Pilots Downed Over Iran
April 6, 2026
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Less than one month after Kalshi got into a legal whoopsie over whether or not they should pay out bettors who wagered on the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the early days of the U.S.'s disastrous war with Iran, the don't-call-us-a-gambling-site's biggest competitor, Polymarket, another gambling site, is facing a similar problem. An F-15 Strike Eagle was shot down on Friday over the southwestern Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, which prompted the U.S.
military to spring into action to stage a rescue mission to retrieve the jet's two-person crew. Polymarket then posted what they call a market on when the rescue mission would be complete. Users who paged over to Polymarket's Iran tab would have scrolled by Kharg Island no longer under Iranian control by...? and Hezbollah military action against Israel on...? to get to US confirms pilots rescued by...? People got mad at Polymarket pretty quickly, because unlike other betting markets on how many people Donald Trump will deport or whether or not Jeffrey Epstein is confirmed to be Satoshi Nakamoto by the end of 2026, this involves members of the U.S. military. Polymarket removed the wager and said in a statement, We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards. It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards. U.S. Rep. and Marine Corps veteran Seth Moulton called it DISGUSTING, and later told CNBC, Polymarket didn’t take that market down because it violated their standards. They took it down because we called them out. He's right. The whole value proposition of prediction markets is that users can bet on anything.
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