Some Polymarket user funds stolen by hackers; exchange referring matter to U.K. authorities
The outage comes just days before the platform is expected to experience heightened trading during the U.S. midterm elections.
Key points
- Polymarket halted trading on its international exchange after users reported unauthorized withdrawals on Thursday.
- The company said the hack hit an unnamed third-party provider and that its U.S. platform was not compromised.
- Analytics firms said one account withdrew at least $2.7 million across 710 other wallets.
Some users of Polymarket's international prediction market exchange had funds stolen from their accounts after a hack of an unnamed third-party provider, the company said. Polymarket has contacted law enforcement and pledged to reimburse affected traders. It is unclear how many users were impacted, and the company's U.S. platform was not compromised.
Traders first reported unauthorized withdrawals on social media on Thursday afternoon, and Polymarket halted trading on its international platform in response. The company said it fixed the issue on its end and trading resumed at 3 p.m. ET.
How refunds will work
Polymarket told users in a Discord chatroom that those who had less than $10,000 taken from their wallets will have funds restored by Oct. 30. Users with more than that amount withdrawn will have to sign a release form to receive their restoration.
This is certainly a significant and new form of breach that we've seen on Polymarket
— Dan Zimmermann, chief intelligence officer at Betting Intelligence
Third-party provider and scale
A person familiar with the matter told CNBC the issue stemmed from a hack of DebugBear, a website performance monitoring platform. DebugBear said on X that it was impacted by a security incident on Thursday, and the person said Polymarket referred the matter to U.K. law enforcement because DebugBear is based there. DebugBear did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An analysis of public data by analytics firms Betting Intelligence and Polysights, provided to CNBC, said an account on Polymarket withdrew at least $2.7 million across 710 other wallets on Thursday. The disruption comes days before heightened volumes are expected during the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3. A similar incident occurred in June, when Polymarket said a third-party vendor had been compromised and that it would refund affected users.
