Police Book 26 South Korean Polymarket Users as Cumulative Bets Reach $12.7 Million

Police have booked 26 South Korean users of overseas crypto-based prediction market platform Polymarket, with their cumulative wagers totaling about $12.7 million.

According to a Sept. 17 report by Asia Economy, an analysis of data the Korean National Police Agency submitted to the office of Democratic Party lawmaker Yoon Kun-young showed the Gangwon Provincial Police Agency's cyber investigation unit had booked 26 Polymarket users as of Sept. 15. Eighteen of them were sent to prosecutors.

The users placed cumulative bets of about $12.7 million on Polymarket. The largest individual bettor wagered about $4.1 million.

Polymarket is a crypto-based platform where users make yes-or-no predictions on whether specific political, social and economic events will occur. Depending on the outcome, users receive 1 USDC or 1 pUSD per share, or lose the money they staked.

The platform operates through non-custodial peer-to-peer trading and automatic settlement, meaning it does not directly hold user assets. While Polymarket does not directly maintain a real-name registry of users, police are understood to have identified and tracked domestic users by analyzing public blockchain transaction records using open-source intelligence, or OSINT, techniques.

Police regard transactions on Polymarket as illegal gambling. Their focus is not the name or form of the trades, but a structure in which financial gains and losses are determined by the outcome of events that cannot be predicted with certainty and on which crypto assets are staked.

Police say that structure meets the elements of a gambling offense under Article 246 of South Korea's Criminal Act. Their position is that the activity is not exempt from gambling charges simply because it resembles derivatives investing or because related guidelines remain insufficient.

Earlier, the Korea Communications Standards Commission voted on Aug. 18 to block domestic access to Polymarket. It said the platform encourages gambling by allowing users to stake money on outcomes that are difficult to control, with profits and losses determined by the result.

At the time, Polymarket said it does not provide Korean-language services, does not support payments in won and operates as a non-custodial peer-to-peer platform that does not directly manage user funds. On that basis, it said it was difficult to view the company as the operator of a gambling venue.

The commission, however, said Polymarket's technical structure and service model alone do not place it beyond the reach of Korean law. It concluded that by offering markets tied to Korean issues and determining users' profits and losses based on outcomes involving chance, the platform was effectively providing an illegal gambling environment for domestic users.