Spotify revealed that a rather uncommon thing happened with Malcolm Todd’s track ‘Earnings’ – it all of a sudden saw a massive jump in play counts. By any stretch of the imagination, it’s a 1 in 77 octillion chance that this is simply due to a genuine surge of interest. Unfortunately, the real reason behind this sudden popularity is that around 500,000 fake streams were logged to try & shape the outcome of prediction markets and secure some nice payouts for the people who made the wager. This is just one of many instances where it’s becoming clear that activities that aren’t supposed to be influenced by markets are getting pulled in – and it’s starting to look like it could create problems all over the place. These kinds of incidents are likely to start becoming more common though – after all, as prediction markets become more widely used & more sophisticated, there’s going to be even more incentive for people to try & game the system. We now have to wonder what the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is going to do – to stop all this market manipulation & ensure that peoples’ bets are all being made on a level playing field – they’ll likely be keeping a very close eye on what’s going on
