Kalshi, Polymarket partnering with fake sports insiders to promote prediction betting

Last week, “credentialed men’s college basketball reporter” Scott Hughes posted on X about Kentucky coach Mark Pope’s press conference following a 94-59 loss to Gonzaga.

According to Hughes, the presser had gone off the rails, with Pope making a molestation joke in response to a reporter’s comment. “Officially off the rails in Nashville,” added Hughes.

The post was destined to go viral, especially as other reporters in the room would invariably share video of the incident.

That, of course, didn’t happen. Because Pope never said the offending comment. Because Hughes was not in Nashville for Pope’s press conference. Because Hughes isn’t real.

The post still went viral, of course.

As many sports fans have learned the hard way in recent weeks, Hughes is the latest in a long line of fake reporters on X, the everything app. Thanks to owner Elon Musk, the few guardrails that existed to tamp down the credibility of such accounts are now gone, and the algorithm pushes their posts toward virality, which is more valuable to the platform than truth.

Amid a collection of fake breaking news and best guesses at stories that may or may not pan out, Hughes also peppers in charts and numbers courtesy of predictive market Kalshi, including one on Kentucky’s chances to win the national title, which was shared a few hours after the Pope post went viral. That’s no coincidence, as Hughes also had a Kalshi Sports icon in his bio, presumably making him an official partner of the company, which is currently facing a class action lawsuit alleging that it operates as “unlicensed sports betting.” It’s unclear what the exact relationship between Hughes and Kalshi is.

Or was. Monday afternoon, Hughes’s account was reclassified by X as a “parody account,” and his Kalshi partnership icon disappeared.

The Scott Hughes account is far from the only fake newsbreaker, though the game appears to be evolving. Whereas that account uses the anonymity of a professional-looking photo, vaguely authentic-sounding credentials, and the verbiage of newsbreakers, Emma Vance is bringing it to a new level.

Self-described as a “lead Polymarket reporter,” Vance went viral last week for posting that Penn State and Matt Campbell were in the final stages of negotiations, accompanying the post with a photo of herself instead of Campbell or the school. Since joining X earlier this year, Vance’s content has been a mix of engagement bait and gambling picks. Around early November, she started promoting prediction market Polymarket. In late November, she attempted to make it seem as though she’d broken the Lanne Kiffin to LSU news. Since then, she’s leaned hard into breaking news insider content, always coupling it with Polymarket data and charts. Polymarket is also promoting Vance as a newsbreaker on its social media platforms.

It doesn’t take much to suss out that Hughes, Vance, and many others on X don’t actually have the sources and insider access they pretend to have, but that’s barely the point anymore on the social media platform. It’s all about engagement, and prediction markets appear to have spotted a way into the vertical. It’s a scummy and immoral way into the space, but X is very much a space where being scummy and immoral is not held against you anymore.

Both Kalshi and Polymarket have been facing increased scrutiny in recent months. David Purdum and Shwetha Surendran at ESPN reported in June that gambling regulators across the U.S. have ordered Kalshi to cease offering sports markets, though they refused, in part, due to their cozy connection to President Donald Trump (Donald Trump, Jr. is a strategic advisor). Meanwhile, Polymarket, which just recently returned to U.S. markets, is still blocked in several countries due to gambling laws. The company is reportedly exploring an internal market-making team that would trade directly against users, which, to many gambling experts, sure sounds like what a sportsbook does.