Polymarket Cracks Down on VPN Users as Legal Pressure Intensifies in Dozens of Countries
Polymarket is intensifying its efforts to block users who utilize VPNs to bypass geoblocking restrictions. This move comes amid increasing legal and regulatory scrutiny in various countries, leading to outright bans in places like Spain and Indonesia. The platform is now implementing identity verification measures and blocking specific IP addresses associated with VPN services.
- ▪Polymarket is actively targeting VPN users to enforce geoblocking rules.
- ▪The platform has started blocking known VPN IP ranges and requesting identity verification from certain users.
- ▪Over 30 jurisdictions, including Spain and Indonesia, have imposed restrictions or bans on prediction markets.
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Record
| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/polymarket-cracks-down-on-vpn-users-as-legal-pressure-intensifies-in-dozens-of-countries-2000765379 |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 19:03:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T19:09:44.224Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T19:09:44.224Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | yg1Kh9YxqI_Y |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Polymarket has started actively targeting users who rely on VPNs to get around its geoblocking rules. The platform now blocks certain IP addresses tied to VPN services and in some cases asks users to verify their identities, according to a report in The Information. These steps come as the company faces growing legal and regulatory pressure worldwide, including full-on bans in countries such as Spain and Indonesia. Meanwhile, VPN providers themselves are also facing increased regulatory pressure in places like Utah and the United…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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