Polymarket Apologizes for Allowing Bets on Downed U.S. Pilots' Fate

A prediction market asking bettors to wager on the rescue date of downed American pilots drew swift public condemnation Friday, forcing Polymarket to delete the listing and issue an apology while a military search and rescue operation was still active in Iran.

The bet, titled "US confirms pilots rescued by...?", allowed users to buy yes or no positions on whether American service members would be recovered by April 3 or April 4. The majority of traders, roughly 63%, predicted the pilots would not be rescued until Saturday. The listing went live after a two-seater F-15E Strike Eagle was shot down over Iran Friday, the first U.S. aircraft lost since the Israeli-U.S. war on Iran began five weeks ago. One crew member was rescued following the crash; the status of the other remained unknown.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a Marine Corps veteran who completed four combat tours between 2001 and 2008, was among the first to publicly flag the market. "This is DISGUSTING," he wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of the active betting page. "There is an ongoing search and rescue operation for a missing American service member whose plane was shot down over Iran. Their safety is unknown. They could be your neighbor, a friend, a family member. And people are betting on whether or not they'll be saved."

Polymarket responded approximately two hours after Moulton's post, pulling the market and posting a statement on X. "We took this market down immediately as it does not meet our integrity standards," the company said. "It should not have been posted, and we are investigating how this slipped through our internal safeguards."

It remains unclear how long the market was available and how many people actually placed trades. The platform did not specify which internal rule the listing violated or whether it was created by a user or generated algorithmically.

The incident sharpened a debate in Washington about the broader risks of prediction markets. "Prediction markets have become a playground for corrupt insiders who are able to place bets on things like election outcomes, wars, and even the deaths of public figures," Moulton said, calling the platforms "a genuine threat to American society today." Moulton also noted in his post that Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Polymarket, adding a political dimension to the criticism.

The episode is feeding wider alarm about prediction markets in Washington, including calls for staff betting bans and concerns that platforms can reward those who may be sitting on nonpublic information.

This was not Polymarket's first controversy tied to the Israeli-Iran conflict. A month earlier, Polymarket users sent threatening messages to an Israeli journalist after one of his reports on a minor missile strike near Jerusalem became the focus of a poll on the platform. Polymarket recently announced it would take action on insider trading, including in political markets, and maintains that it does not offer death-pool markets or anything resembling them. Friday's episode suggested that the platform's automated safeguards failed to catch a listing that crossed precisely that line, with a missing service member's fate reduced to a tradable contract while a rescue operation was still underway.