Top Kalshi Trader Caleb Davies often talks to the press about how prediction markets help him make money. The Minneapolis-based IT worker estimates he has earned $1.2 million in total across different prediction platforms, with $414,000 in earnings on Kalshi cultural markets alone. He especially likes betting on music charts, because he carefully analyzes Spotify data to pick the winners. “Every morning I go in, download the data and update my projections,” he tells WIRED.

This summer, however, he has become increasingly agitated over what he claims is an obvious, bot-driven effort to manipulate markets related to Spotify. He recently began collecting and publishing evidence for his theory, and eventually became so convinced that he contacted Spotify, Kalshi, and Polymarket with his concerns.

This week, things reached a boiling point when Malcolm Todd’s song “Earrings” shot to number one on a Spotify chart. In a series of X posts, Davies described his alleged culprit: “botting,” or scammers who buy bots to boost streaming numbers. Davies argued that prediction market traders were altering charts to influence the outcome of event-related contracts. Todd’s song was such an underdog that it wasn’t even listed as an option on Polymarket: “If we look at the data set of changes from Sunday to Monday, it was an 11.24 sigma event, or about a 1 in 77 octillion chance of occurring at random,” Davies wrote.

Turns out he was right. Spotify confirmed to WIRED that it investigated alleged tampering incidents that Davies flagged and found evidence of artificial streaming. “All streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation. Spotify has best practices for detecting and mitigating manipulated streams, and we don’t pay associated royalties,” says spokesperson Laura Batey. (The company offered no explanation for the manipulation, however, so Davies’ theory that it was directly linked to a scheme to manipulate prediction markets remains just that.)

Spotify eventually adjusted its charts to account for the discrepancy, selecting over 500,000 artificial streams, which moved Todd’s song from first to fourth. However, the process was not immediate and Kalshi had already settled the market to reward traders who selected Todd’s song.

“We are in contact with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter,” Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana tells WIRED. Those conversations prompted a more immediate change: At the Swedish streaming giant’s request, Kalshi removed the Spotify logo from its company-related marketplaces and adjusted language that initially suggested Spotify had verified the chart results.

When Davies first approached Kalshi to express his concerns, the company’s chief watchdog, Robert DeNault, told the trader that only Spotify could definitively confirm whether he had been booted, noting that there could be non-suspicious reasons for the increase. DeNault also theorized that Kalshi traders could simply be copying what their peers on Polymarket were doing.

“No one from Polymarket benefited from the fraud. That’s what undermines Kalshi’s argument, because they didn’t have a Malcom Todd group,” Davies tells WIRED.

Polymarket also refutes this theory. “It’s actually implausible as we didn’t even have Malcolm Todd as an option in this Spotify market,” said spokesperson Annabel Walsh. The company confirmed that it is reviewing the broader transmission tampering situation, but has not identified any immediate tampering so far.

No one has spoken to the people or group of people behind the streaming manipulation, so their motivations remain unclear. (Todd did not respond to requests for comment, but there is nothing to suggest he is anything more than an innocent bystander.)