Insider trading used to be the domain of mergers and acquisitions lawyers, bankers in contrast collars, and Martha Stewart — people with influence using tips from their station in life to win while people on the outside lost. But the game has been opened up for millions of Americans, democratized by prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, where users can bet on anything, including, in some cases, an outcome they know is going to happen. Or try to make happen. For example, it took me, a 35-year-old man with two roommates and no particular skills or connections to power, about nine minutes to figure out how to rig a win on Kalshi.

My plot, which I totally did not do by the way, involved Kalshi markets for the movie-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The exchange allows users to wager on the scores for blockbuster films to the nearest fifth percent: 20 percent positive, 85 percent positive, etc. My idea was to boost the score of a bad flick (sorry, Scary Movie) into a higher and more unlikely tranche to double my money on a $1,000 bet. So I emailed about four dozen Rotten Tomatoes–certified reviewers asking if they would hypothetically consider giving the parody a great review so we could all win big.

Several said no. Jeopardizing their Tomatometer certification, and the free movie screeners that come with it, would not be worth the risk of winning less than two grand each, they said. But Brian Eggert, founder of Deep Focus Review, thought my plan to assemble an Ocean’s 8 of ethically compromised movie bloggers could work. “I would have thought that would have been impossible until the Bunker 15 thing,” he said, referring to the scandal in which a publicity company apparently paid reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes $50 for good reviews (Bunker 15 has denied this). “If you’re offering $2,000, yeah, you’re gonna have people who bite.” With the previous Scary Movie installment getting 50 reviews, a handful of artificially warmed-up reviews could make it a sure thing.

According to a few prediction-market experts, there was a better way to do this: Take a universally loved movie and submit a review, just before the deadline, saying it sucks. “When a movie is in the 90s, it’s way easier to move down then if it’s in the 70s or the 50s because it’s too easy for the regular critics to offset your scamming critics,” says Caleb Davies, a full-time prediction-market user who focuses on movie-review scores.

It was such a simple idea that someone else may have already done it. “I’ve seen one example of manipulating these markets, and it was when a guy clearly got himself approved to be a fake critic,” says prediction-market user Zubby Badger. Five years ago, Badger left his job working in pharma regulation to bet on prediction markets full time; since then, he has become one of the top traders of Rotten Tomatoes reviews. Last July, he and other prediction marketeers noticed that a new movie critic, Khai Rated, submitted a positive review for The Naked Gun, then resubmitted a poor review just before the movie’s market on Kalshi closed. “That seemed a little weird,” says Badger.

Things got weirder in August with the TV series Alien: Earth. Khai Rated wrote a positive review, then resubmitted his review of several episodes to tank the score several points last minute. According to Badger, he saw an account on Kalshi trading thousands of dollars’ worth of shares at the lower price just after the bad reviews were submitted. As Kalshi users began flagging the trades on a private Discord channel for Rotten Tomatoes bettors called Cat Clan, Khai Rated deleted all his movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. “The Medium page where he was writing all his reviews was deleted, and that was it,” says Badger, who had to sell his Alien: Earth position at a loss. (Rotten Tomatoes did not respond to a request for comment about the alleged manipulation, and Khai Rated appears to be in the wind.) “I was furious,” Badger says. “It’s not like I clicked on a link and somebody........

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