The Polymarket South Korea gambling review has entered a formal hearing stage, with the Broadcasting, Media and Communications Review Committee opting to take the platform’s own submission before deciding whether to issue a corrective order. The committee said the pause would let it verify both the legality of the service and its operational mechanics before reaching a conclusion.
Gangwon Police Track Crypto Transactions as Polymarket South Korea Gambling Probe Targets Users
The committee’s review sits alongside a separate criminal investigation already under way. Crypto Briefing places the start of that probe at 5 June 2026, when the Gangwon Provincial Police Agency opened what local media called the country’s first inquiry into domestic Polymarket users over alleged illegal election-related gambling.
According to Bloomberg, the cyber investigation unit’s focus is on domestic users, not the platform itself. The agency is tracking crypto transactions to identify those individuals, with potential liability falling under Article 246 of the Criminal Act.
The stakes are not trivial. South Korea’s Criminal Act sets fines of up to 10 million won (around $6,500) for basic gambling offences. Habitual gambling can bring up to three years in prison or fines of up to 20 million won. Operating a gambling venue for profit carries penalties of up to five years in prison or a fine of 30 million won.
The scale of activity under scrutiny gives some context for why authorities moved. KuCoin reported that Polymarket’s resolved 2026 Seoul mayoral election market alone recorded a total trading volume of $52.2 million, placing activity well into the tens of billions of won across Korean election markets combined.
South Korea is not an outlier in facing this tension. According to the same KuCoin report, citing Chainalysis data, South Korea ranks 15th in the 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. Of the top 20 markets on that index, six have already moved against prediction platforms through gambling law, derivatives restrictions, ISP blocks, user enforcement, or some combination of those tools.
CFTC and ESMA Add Pressure as Regulatory Scrutiny Goes Multi-Jurisdictional
South Korea’s proceedings are one front in a broader regulatory push. In the European Union, the European Securities and Markets Authority clarified this month that some event-based contracts could already fall within the scope of MiFID II if they qualify as financial instruments, and could become subject to existing retail restrictions on binary options without new legislation being required.
The United States front is more complicated. CNBC reports that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under Chairman Michael Selig is conducting a broad investigation into Polymarket’s business activities, including its social media operations. That inquiry would be the commission’s first high-profile action against an event contract platform under Selig’s leadership, given his generally supportive stance toward prediction markets.
WRAL, citing two people familiar with the matter, reports the current investigation began earlier in 2026 and is extensive in scope. A year prior, the CFTC under a different agency head killed a previous investigation into whether Polymarket was illegally serving US customers, over the strong objections of its own enforcement attorneys.
This is not Polymarket’s first CFTC encounter. PYMNTS reports that the CFTC previously settled an enforcement action against the platform, then operating as Blockratize Inc., over unregistered event-based binary options contracts, more than four years before the current inquiry.
The reported investigation followed Wall Street Journal allegations that Polymarket promoted simulated trading videos through paid content creators without adequate disclosure. Polymarket told CNBC it had begun auditing its promotional content for compliance with company standards and legal disclosure requirements.
On-chain research firm Allium reported this week that US-linked wallets traded roughly $571 million worth of political contracts on Polymarket over the past year, despite the platform’s restrictions on American users. Allium cautioned that its country attribution covered only a small share of wallets and should be treated as directional rather than exact.
Polymarket states that users from 33 countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, and Australia, cannot access the platform. It also blocks certain regions within otherwise permitted countries, including several Canadian provinces and parts of eastern Ukraine.
The committee hearing is the immediate binary: if Polymarket’s submission is deemed insufficient, a corrective request follows, which would likely escalate to ISP-level blocking. The CFTC timeline is less defined, but the revival of an inquiry that was previously shelved under political pressure suggests the current scope goes well beyond the social media disclosure question.
