Even if you aren’t old enough to remember the heyday of Columbia House, you’re probably familiar with the scam at its center. The mail-order club would offer customers eight to 12 CDs, tapes, records — and, in later years, DVDs and blu-rays — for a penny. By agreeing to the arrangement, users were signed up for a scheme where they agreed to purchase a certain number of products over a specific amount of time at full price. Each month, they were sent a mailer promoting the “Selection of the Month,” and if the customer failed to return the rejection form, Columbia House would send them the new release and charge their account.  

The practice of requiring customers to opt-out or be charged is called negative-option billing, and it inspired no end of complaints from customers. Columbia House drew further claims of bad business by allegedly refusing to acknowledge payments, discounting items so that users’ purchases fell just below the agreed-upon threshold and being a notoriously difficult subscription to terminate.

Columbia House was a bum deal for musicians as well, selling the CDs at a reduced price and offering the artists a smaller royalty percentage, the argument being that the cut paid for the mail-order club’s marketing. That Columbia House was owned by massive record labels for much of its existence, and that the club manufactured their own cheaper versions of the releases to cut costs, gave the whole process an even more corrupt odor. Pearl Jam protested the practices of Columbia House, and the bum deal it gave artists, but made little headway as the club boomed to 16 million members in the 1990s. 

Given all that, I was somewhat surprised to see heartfelt eulogies for the mail-order racket when Columbia House announced it was ceasing operations later this year. Social media buzzed with stories about how “magical” it was to get CDs in far-flung locations. One academic who immigrated to the United States said junk mail from the retailer helped convince her that she’d really become an American. Others lamented the death of a “part of their childhood.” 

Most of the rosy posts made some mention of the fact that Columbia House’s operation was unethical at best, but that the customer-service runarounds, unwelcome bills and general scuzziness had all faded with time. Where the company was once the best-known name in media rip-offs, it now leaves behind only mass-produced plastic and fuzzy memories. 

Like Blockbuster, which was decried in its time as a killer of mom-and-pop video stores that ripped off customers with steep late fees, Columbia House died long after the average music consumer ceased doing business with it. That can account for at least some of the paeans to building a music collection on the cheap, or paying extortionate prices for movies once your skeevier dollar-video-shop was run out of town, but it’s far from the whole story. Awash in constant robot spam callers seeking sensitive information, in a country where the president is running his own cryptocurrency grift, the Columbia House swindle feels quaint.

In part, this is thanks to the technology at the heart of Columbia House. In an era before widespread tracking technology followed everyone’s consumption habits around the internet, Columbia House was remarkably easy to scam back. People signed up their pets, used aliases and played games with mailing addresses to bilk the company out of new releases for less than the cost of a penny. The ads, which came as paper mailers — in contrast to soon-to-be popular malware, pop-up ads and phishing emails — were decidedly less invasive and easily ignored. (After all, their easy-to-miss nature was a key part of the Columbia House business model.) 

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And unlike the bank-draining, generative AI-boosted rip-offs of 2026, you did actually get something for your trouble. Customers who forgot to send a postcard saying they wanted nothing to do with ‘90s Steven Tyler can still point to a copy of “Nine Lives” on their shelves. My own classic-rock-loving father ended up with copies of Whitney Houston and Alanis Morissette albums that he, left to his own devices, wouldn’t have sought out. But “Heartbreak Hotel” and “You Oughtta Know” were regularly spun in the car.  

Nowadays, the taboo around scamming has fallen out of fashion with Gen Z, who see devious business models as a way to get ahead in a rigged economy. Amazon and other online marketplaces created a boom for drop-shippers to mark up products without providing any further value to customers. The internet-savvy and unscrupulous were quick to cash in. More than a decade after scam rap emerged from the buzzier, grimier corners of Detroit hip-hop, a scammer anthem from a South Floridian is arguably the song of the summer. 

Americans lose more than $100 billion to scams every single year. As more and more of the country’s citizens feel like they’re being had, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to be rushing to stop the con. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that they could be in on it.

White House insiders are reportedly using privileged information to place wagers on grey-area betting platforms. Nine accounts on the platform Polymarket made millions on U.S. military actions in Iran, winning nearly all of their 80 wagers on U.S. strikes and ceasefire negotiations. The former White House teleprompter operator allegedly made tens of thousands placing bets on what words Donald Trump might use in his speeches. The president himself has spent much of his second term accepting luxurious gifts and donations that sure read like bribes in the right light. Trump has increased his net worth by more than $2 billion in his second term, largely through the launch of a crypto firm operated by his sons. He accepted a $400 million jet from the royal family of Qatar and has pardoned multiple people after their families made large donations to his campaign. Former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told the Washington Post that Trump had “fully monetize[d] the Oval Office” and was carrying out “corruption on a scale that . . . has few rivals in world history.”

What’s paying full price for an Ugly Kid Joe CD you never wanted compared to all that?

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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

A 2004 paper on the history of presidential election betting markets kicks off with a partial quote from the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century essay “Civil Disobedience”: “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”

Not everyone agrees with that last part. And the rapid rise of online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket are bringing that tension to the fore.

Prediction markets are websites that sell contracts that allow users to wager on event outcomes. Political examples could include which party will control the U.S. House or Senate after the midterms, for example. Typically, there are fixed payouts and the price of the contract reflects the market’s expectation of the odds of the outcome.

It isn’t yet entirely clear who regulates prediction markets and how, and markets have regularly clashed with state officials trying to rein them in. When it comes to elections, most states have laws prohibiting election betting in some form or fashion, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released in June. But many such laws predate modern prediction markets and haven’t necessarily been tested in court recently.

Kalshi recently pushed back on Wisconsin election officials after they issued an advisory about a state law dating back to the 19th century that says voters can’t cast ballots in races they’ve bet on. A Kalshi staffer said on social media the Wisconsin advisory meant election officials were engaged in “active voter suppression.”

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However the legal situation shakes out, betting on elections is happening. An NBC News analysis found nearly $200 million in trading volume on midterm election outcomes on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, and election officials say they are concerned about how the odds on such sites could influence public trust in election outcomes — particularly when election results differ from those the markets had favored — and about creating incentives for manipulation.

“I think it is something that we are going to have to wrestle with going into the November election and forward,” said Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, California, the country’s single most populous election jurisdiction, during a webinar organized by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions this month.

Logan said in the Los Angeles mayoral primary in June, “early election returns differed from market expectations, and that resulted in suspicion and questioning of normal ballot processing and canvassing procedures in California.” The bottom line, he said, is that “elections administration right now is very much affected by perception and misinformation, and in our field we have to be prepared to respond to that.”

‘This is all bad’

Prediction markets say their odds reflect the wisdom of the crowds and can be more accurate than polling. And these markets have been pretty good at predicting elections in the past. For example, the 2004 paper that quoted Thoreau, by economics professors Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, analyzed data on election gambling between 1868 and 1940 and found that the historical markets “did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling.”

But prediction markets differ from polls in important ways. Polls are representative samples of just the voters who live in the state or district in question; prediction markets are open to anyone, and the more money a person bets, the more influence they have on the odds.

And election officials, already worried about low public trust in elections, are concerned the odds on these markets could be manipulated to influence public perception of a contest or create new financial incentives to shape outcomes. Kalshi and Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.

Jim Allen, the elections director of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which had already banned election workers from directly betting on elections, earlier this year added a ban on using prediction markets to do so. He likened it to referees betting on the outcome of a basketball game.

The new language, he said during the PLEJ webinar, “kicked off a conversation at our poll worker training. There was one person out of 383 precincts, one person who stood up and they said, ‘Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be? That’ll keep things interesting.’ And we said, ‘No, this is all bad.’”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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We went late into the evening waiting for absentee ballots in Milwaukee County last night. But Milwaukee County executive David Crowley will become the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, despite it seeming like a certainty that Francesca Hong would be the winner. As of yesterday, every recent poll had shown Hong at least 20 points ahead. The two most recent public polls had her 22 and 25 points ahead. (The most recent poll from Crowley’s own camp showed Hong 19 points ahead!) We’ll come back to the question of why these polls have been so wildly off. But there was a different casualty from the night’s results that I personally enjoyed witnessing because it’s a hobbyhorse or pet peeve of mine — and it seems to be as well of the numbers crunchers/data nerds whose Twitter feeds I watch on elections night. I’m talking here about the “prediction markets.”

As the western United States is gripped by record-shattering wildfires, some unscrupulous people aren’t just contemplating what it will be like for future generations living in our new normal of erratic weather patterns, or wondering whether climate change is making this situation worse. They’re thinking about how much money they can make. 

Prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to bet on pretty much anything, whether it’s some boring sports thing, election results or perhaps even war crimes. You can even bet on the outcome of clinical drug trials and whether cancer drugs will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which experts criticize as undermining the integrity of medication research. The father of a seventh-grader living with cancer recently raised the issue of “whether researchers in a trial could be motivated by prediction market profits,” something so heinous it is difficult to contemplate.

While the makers of these apps insist they are “future exchanges,” not digital gambling parlors, regulators in places like Singapore, France, Belgium and elsewhere aren’t convinced and have banned the platforms altogether. There are several mechanisms inherent to prediction market apps that make them a little different than putting it all on red. They involve binary contracts that resolve based on whether certain events happen or not, using some complex math to factor in a probability of an outcome. Critics are increasingly looking into the consequences of making almost everything wagerable.

On Aug. 3, Democratic senators from six states sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the independent government arm that regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, warning that the apps are allowing bets to be placed on wildfires, which could incentivize arson. They highlight previous examples of bets placed on the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, which razed large areas of Los Angeles County, killing 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures. 

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter’s authors, who include Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wrote. “There’s also the heightened risk — according to state and local fire officials — that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”

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For example, someone might bet on how big a fire might get or how many buildings it might destroy. I wanted to know what unexpected stuff I could find on the apps, so I downloaded Polymarket and Kalshi, seemingly the two most popular platforms or at least the ones I’m tired of seeing ads of the most. Both were littered with sports events, which I scrolled past, but also had sections for elections, politics, tech and a lot more. Polymarket seemed to have fewer and more bland options for betting, with the most shocking queries I could find being things like who will get kicked out of Trump admin next or if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested by year’s end.

After giving over way too much private data to Kalshi, I was able to browse entire categories dedicated to natural disasters and climate change, such as if 2026 will be the hottest year ever or if the U.S. will ever meet its climate goals. I also found weird things like how many Atlantic hurricanes this year or if California will be hit by a magnitude 8 earthquake, which goes without saying but would be extremely bad. For context, the recent Colombia and Venezuela earthquakes were both magnitude 7.4 and 7.5 respectively. All of these things are likely to kill countless people if they happen, but climate change is already widely treated like an abstract future problem, rather than our disastrous present, so maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.

Both apps allowed wagers on the number of “explosive diarrhea” cyclosporiasis and measles cases this year, with both outbreaks shattering records. I could not find anything related to fires, presumably such content being recently removed, as there have been plenty of cited examples of bets on fires in the past, such as how many acres or locations the Palisades fires would reach.

So many of the scenarios on these apps present classic examples of a perverse incentive, in which the structure of a system encourages undesirable results. The classic example is of dubious historical accuracy, but originates from the British occupation of India. Weary of venomous snake bites, British authorities put a bounty on dead cobras — but this only incentivized locals to breed more of the snakes, in order to collect even more reward money. If you allow people to earn cash from dead snakes, you risk getting a lot more living snakes in the process.

Are we already seeing this with wildfires? It’s hard to say, but it’s true that arson is, strangely, a common catalyst for wildfires. One man was arrested outside of Spokane a few days ago, admitting to starting the Old Trails Fire, which burned entire neighborhoods to a crisp. Police say that Aaron Farinacci admitted to having set two dozen other blazes since 2025.

The conditions that make these blazes so out-of-control are thanks to climate change, which is causing hotter and drier conditions. According to a 2021 study supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the increase in fire weather in the western U.S. is primarily due to climate change. (Still, trying to explain that level of nuance to a climate denier is like teaching rocks to play Risk.)

What these apps do best is lay bare the ways in which our entire economy is structured like a betting app strung together by incentive perverts. It’s why the market rewards the most amoral and destructive behavior, from hedge funds that short the market and destroy company value to vulture capitalists who gut businesses like Toys “R” Us or Radio Shack, and then escape on their golden corporate parachutes. Even when such behavior results in a recession, the government is likely to bail big corporations out, while any form of assistance for the working class is branded as “socialism.” In fact, the entire stock market could be best described as a casino that incentivizes absurd growth like the historic tech bubble provoked by the spread of artificial intelligence.

Mainstream economists may want you to believe all this is driven by Darwinian forces that follow some natural law, simplified as “the cost of doing business,” or even by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But that’s pretty unscientific.

Money itself is just a construct, one with rules dreamt up by humans. We don’t have to live in a world where people profit from tragedy, be it wildfires or a child with cancer, housing foreclosures or weapons manufacturing. I’m willing to bet we can actually achieve such a utopian outcome, even if it takes another century. The alternative is to continue draining everything of value as it goes up in smoke. 

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