By Michelle Conlin

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Federal law enforcement raided Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s home in downtown New York on Wednesday and seized his phone and electronics, the company confirmed.

The early morning raid on Coplan’s SoHo apartment followed last week’s presidential election, when bettors at Polymarket, an offshore, crypto-backed election gambling site, spent weeks placing Donald Trump’s odds far higher than Vice President Kamala Harris’s. It’s different from opinion polls.

Coplan, the 26-year-old founder of Polymarket, was dragged from his bed at 6 a.m. when FBI agents demanded he give them his electronic devices.

The DOJ is investigating Polymarket for allegedly allowing U.S.-based users to place bets on the site, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday evening.

Polymarket declined to comment on these allegations, but a spokesman said the FBI raid was “clear political revenge by the outgoing administration against Polymarket for providing a market that accurately called the 2024 presidential election.”

The company told Reuters Coplan was not arrested or detained.

The FBI declined to comment. The Justice Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on the raid.

As the presidential election approached, the site attracted a lot of attention as it boosted Trump’s chances above Harris’s when opinion polls had shown the race was tightening for months.

Polymarket, which does not allow trading in the US, has come under scrutiny after a mysterious French trader known as the Polymarket whale placed big bets that Trump would win the election.

The trader’s big bets came with a dramatic rise in Trump’s fortunes on the stock markets.

He walked away with a profit of more than $46 million.

Last week, France’s gambling regulator said it was reviewing whether Polymarket complied with French law.

(Reporting by Michelle Conlin in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Stephen Coates)