The betting firm which let punters have a flutter on Iran strikes

Who benefits from the assault on Iran? Donald Trump? Israel? The country’s beleaguered opposition? Or is it those with the foresight to actually bet on when the US would launch its strikes?

Incredibly, one US betting firm had been allowing punters to have a flutter on when Trump’s administration would start flinging its missiles into the theocratic state. New York-based Polymarket, which had previously been at the centre of a controversy about suspicions of insider trading on the Super Bowl halftime show, was running an online book on “US next strikes Iran on…?” It allowed users of its website to gamble on the date – which they did, with a whopping $53 million waged.

Polymarket has defended allowing people to bet on war, claiming somehow that what it was doing was “invaluable”. In a statement on its site it said: “The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today.

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“After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realised that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.”

It was certainly invaluable for some – such as the six gamblers who appeared to have turned a £1.2 million profit correctly predicting the date of the strikes. All six of the online accounts appeared to have been set up in the immediate 24 hours beforehand, specifically bet on February 28 and bought “yes” hours before the strike. How fortuitous!

Still, perhaps they predicted it by the unusually high number of pizza deliveries to the Pentagon in the hours leading up to the assault. An X account, Pentagon Pizza Watch, showed an extreme spike the afternoon before, with orders from Dominos up 326%, Pizzato Pizza 208% and Extreme Pizza 127% – traditionally a sign something is afoot among America’s peckish warmongers.