Polymarket is working with United Kingdom law enforcement following a security breach that allowed hackers to siphon funds from several users on its international exchange. The incident came to light Thursday afternoon when traders began reporting unauthorized withdrawals across social media, prompting the platform to temporarily halt all trading activity. While the company confirmed that its U.S. operations remained secure, the vulnerability appeared linked to a compromise at DebugBear, a UK based website performance monitoring service used by the exchange.
Preliminary data suggests the scale of the theft was significant, with analysts noting that one specific account managed to withdraw at least 2.7 million dollars distributed across hundreds of different digital wallets. Polymarket acted quickly to patch the vulnerability and restored trading services by late Thursday afternoon. To mitigate the damage and maintain trust among its user base, the company has pledged to fully reimburse every trader impacted by the heist.
The timing of the attack is particularly precarious for Polymarket, as it prepares for a massive surge in traffic ahead of the November 3rd U.S. midterm elections. This isn’t the first time the decentralized finance platform has faced such hurdles; a similar event occurred back in June involving another compromised third party vendor. As investigators in Britain look into DebugBear’s role in the leak, Polymarket continues to operate without formal regulation within the United States via its Polygon blockchain infrastructure.
