A top merchant of Kalshi Caleb Davies usually he speaks for the media about how prediction markets help him make money. The Minneapolis-based IT worker estimates he’s made $1.2 million in total across different prediction platforms, with $414,000 in winnings from. of Kalshi cultural markets only. He especially enjoys playing on the music charts, because he carefully analyzes Spotify’s data to pick the winners. “Every single morning, I log in, download the data, and update my estimates,” he tells WIRED.
This summer, though, he’s become increasingly angry about what he claims is an apparent, bot-driven effort to manipulate Spotify-related markets. He recently began collecting and publishing evidence for his theory, eventually becoming so convinced that he contacted Spotify, Kalshi, and Polymarket with his concerns.
This week, the situation hit the boiling point when Malcolm Todd’s song “Pete” rose to number one on the Spotify chart. In a series of X posts, Davies described his suspect: “botting,” or scammers who buy bots with numbers to juice. Davies said that prediction market traders were charting to influence the outcome of related event contracts. Todd’s song was so poor that it wasn’t even listed as an option on Polymarket: “If you look at the Sunday-to-Monday swing dataset, it was an 11.24 sigma event, or about a 1 in 77 octillion chance of happening randomly,” Davies wrote.
Turns out he was onto something. Spotify confirmed to WIRED that it investigated the suspected manipulation incidents that Davies reported and found evidence of fake streams. “All streaming services face ever-changing streaming exchanges. Spotify has the best practices for detecting and mitigating altered streams, and we don’t pay related royalties,” spokesperson Laura Batey says. (The company did not provide any explanation for the fraud, however, so Davies’ theory that it was directly linked to a scheme to manipulate the prediction markets remains valid.)
Spotify eventually adjusted its charts to account for the difference, removing more than 500,000 streams, which dropped Todd’s song from number one to number four. The process wasn’t quick, though, and Kalshi had already rigged the market to reward traders who chose Todd’s song.
“We are in contact with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter,” Kalshi spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana told WIRED. That conversation led to more immediate changes: At the Swedish streaming giant’s request, Kalshi removed Spotify’s logo from its company-related marketing, revising language that previously suggested Spotify had proven chart results.
When Davies first contacted Kalshi with concerns, the company’s chief executive Robert DeNault told the businessman that only Spotify could confirm for sure if it had been hit, and noted that there could be unquestionable reasons for the uptick. DeNault also floated the theory that the Kalshi merchants may be simply copying what their peers were doing at Polymarket.
“Nobody from Polymarket benefited from the fraud. That’s what undermines Kalshi’s argument, because they didn’t have Malcom Todd’s bracket,” Davies tells WIRED.
Polymarket refutes this theory as well. “It’s impossible because we didn’t even have Malcolm Todd as an option in this Spotify marketplace,” said spokeswoman Annabel Walsh. The company confirmed that it is reviewing the broader situation of streaming fraud, but has not identified any one-off fraud so far.
No one has spoken to the people or group of people behind the streaming scam, so their motivations remain unclear. (Todd did not respond to requests for comment, but there’s nothing to suggest he’s an innocent bystander.)
