We spent a month hiding in a Kalshi clipping Discord

—by Ryan Broderick and Selia Hooten

Following a tip we received from a reader, we’ve spent the last few weeks hiding out in a Discord server that’s paying users to make clips and memes for Kalshi — and possibly other brands, as well. The offers going out to would-be clippers are for everything from World Cup tickets to David Protein bars. And very few of these posts seem to be disclosed as ads once they go live. Which is likely violating Federal Trade Commission guidelines.

The company running the Discord is called FindClout and it brags on its website that “Memes get shared. Ads get skipped.” They specialize in the keywords “sports, betting, parlay.” Users sign up for campaigns through FindClout’s Discord or Telegram, create clips, and then get paid out through Paypal. In one room of the 5,000-member Discord, users share screenshots of their payouts, which can be as high as $2,000. As far as why clients would work with a company like FindClout, they claim on their website that they undercut Meta’s own advertising rate, offering clients “1/50th” of what Meta would charge. 

According to FindClout’s terms and conditions, the user making and posting the clips is responsible for both the content they post and for clearly marking the posts as ads. The company offers custom “interactive ad” tools, two of which are for Kalshi. Users can manufacture Kalshi assets that are personalized to individual videos. And clippers are told that they should find the Kalshi market that best fits their campaign, upload their clip, and manually simulate the Kalshi market for that topic: “[Hit] GREEN when your team scores. [Hit] RED when the other side does,” the instructions read. When they do, the tool generates a banner that mimics prediction market outcomes, though there is no requirement for the banner to actually reflect the market. 

FindClout’s website says that formats “may resemble, reference, or reproduce the names, marks, trade dress, or typefaces of third parties (including regulated brands such as prediction-market and sports-betting-adjacent services). These are provided as-is, for your convenience only, and are not a representation that you are licensed or authorized to use them.” A recent offer in the Discord told users they should “naturally feature” David Protein and not tag them directly, and used an example of a meme video where David Protein’s ice cream was photoshopped into a scene from the film Obsession.

What’s striking about FindClout’s operation is how not only are video creators not communicating directly with the brands they’re ostensibly advertising, they’re barely communicating with anyone on FindClout’s team. We can see that users are making content and that someone is approving that content and paying them for it, but it’s been extremely difficult to find out anything else about how it all works. We’ve struggled to figure out who owns it, who works there, and we aren’t even sure if the brands they’re making memes for know that those posts are coming from a Discord of random users.

FindClout’s founder goes by “Jonah” on most of their public pages. His full name is Jonah Attia, and according to LinkedIn, he’s a student at the University of Michigan. There’s a phone number for him on FindClout’s website. We called it and a man answered, but when we identified ourselves as journalists, he hung up. After subsequent calls, he declined to comment. A user going by “jonahbuilds” posted on Hacker News about FindClout last December, writing, “Right now the network is ~50 instagram creators doing around 40–50 million views per day total. Most are meme pages with U.S. and U.K. Gen Z audiences. This is still early, mostly me wiring things together for my own stuff and friends’ projects, and trying not to break creators’ pages in the process.” 

But there are other real names that pop up on the server. FindClout uses the third-party platform Frame.io to approve content and, on June 16, a user named “Ben Gluntz” made time-stamped comments on a “Kalshi x Messi” World Cup video. The top search result for the name led us to a man who runs a Christian podcast called “Created to Create.” We reached out to the email on his website, but have yet to received a response. 

On the same video, below Gluntz’s comments, a user going by Jace Foddrill made edits, as well. Foddrill was mentioned in the original tip we received about FindClout. We found a LinkedIn for Foddrill, which appears to have been taken down recently. We also found an entry on The Org, which lists Foddrill as a “production coordinator” at New York marketing agency George P. Johnson. We’ve reached out to GPJ to see if they are working with FindClout.

We also found a public comment from a “Jace Foddrill” that was submitted back in March to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the independent agency tasked with regulating US derivative markets. Foddrill identified himself as a California-based journalist who did not participate in these markets, but has “come to rely on [them] as a unique source of insight.” Foddrill said in the comment that prediction markets are “a public good that helps inform reporting and decision-making for everyone.”

The third real name that appeared in FindClout’s Discord was Filip Jansén, which we came across in a Google Drive folder. And that’s where this story gets even stranger. Jansén is listed on LinkedIn as the head of partnerships for another clipping company, called Clipster, which appears to be a much larger operation than FindClout. We’re lurking in their Discord as well, which has nearly 100,000 users in it. Per their website, they have a wider range of clients, including Universal Music artists like Canadian DJ Frank Walker, entrepreneur Nick Ayala, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, and crypto casino Duel.

Eagle-eyed Garbage Day readers might recognize that last one there. We wrote about Duel last week. It’s owned by a company called Immortal Snail LLC and was built by Finnish poker player Ossi Ketola, who, before Duel, was running CSGOEmpire, an online casino for Counter-Strike skins. On June 11, a Google Drive folder of video assets for a Duel livestream featuring the rapper Lil Pump, uploaded by Jansén, was shared on FindClout’s Discord. We’ve reached out to Clipster for more information on whether they’re working with smaller clipping companies like FindClout, but have yet to receive a response.

We’ve also reached out to a handful of the brands we’ve seen pop up in FindClout’s Discord over the last few weeks. We haven’t heard anything back yet, but after we started sending requests for comment to various parties included in this story, previously public pages for FindClout’s campaigns started redirecting to the homepage. The same thing happened a week after we joined the Discord, which we are still in. It now requires mod approval for new users. Kalshi, in particular, has refused to answer several emails we’ve sent them over the last few months regarding their advertising practices. But there does appear to be some kind of relationship between Kalshi and FindClout. 

On FindClout’s website, there are listings for active campaigns, which typically include links to examples of memes that users should try and emulate. Earlier this month, we clicked on an Instagram link listed on FindClout’s website and it still contained metadata from where it originally came from. A message popped up reading, “@salmansohani shared this content with you,” meaning the @salmansohani account shared it with someone at FindClout that then posted it.

Well, the @salmansohani account matches the name and biographical details of Salman Sohani, who currently works on Kalshi’s “growth” team.

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I made a prediction last week that we’re about to see a lot of Bush era-style Republican scolding. And, lo and behold, here comes The New York Post proving my point perfectly. They went after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani over the weekend for, uh, having the audacity to jump in a public pool with his suit on.

“All swimmers are required to wear bathing suits in Big Apple public pools, and males need to have mesh lining in their trunks — unless they prefer Speedos, which are also allowed,” the Post reported. “The rules are to maintain healthy chemical levels in the pools, according to the Parks Department.”

It took the American right a very long time to reinvent themselves as something “cool.” They spent the bulk of the 2010s fighting the perception that they were bow-tie-wearing no fun police. They embraced the anarchic language of 4chan and Reddit and spent the Trump years and the pandemic attacking the libs as wokescolds that want to wear masks and enforce pronouns and blah blah blah, you were there lol. But it’s worth paying attention to how fast all of that falls apart when Democrats just completely ignore them.

Oh, also, it’s not just conservatives that are falling back into old patterns. Here’s nice old school meme about Mamdani’s cannonball to enjoy.

President Donald Trump’s idiotic Great American State Fair is not going well. Musical guest Vanilla Ice had to drop out last minute due to weather. And, also, just, more generally, no one is going. I thought the UFC watch party on the White House lawn earlier this month was under-attended, but based on photos and videos coming out of the State Fair, I’d say we’re talking about a crowd of maybe hundreds of people. But, hey, if you do attend, you can get baptized, enjoy a pancake-eating competition where everyone throws up, and watch a military robot fall over in the mud. You also might end up seeing a conservative livestreamer get arrested for (allegedly) cranking it in public.

Gian Rachtelli, who goes by Manny on X, was arrested this weekend for “obscene acts” after fairgoers told law enforcement that Rachtelli was filming female performers “with his hand in his pants.”

Rachtelli’s followers are claiming he was just digging in the pockets of his American flag overalls and that he’s innocent. Happy 250th, America.

OK, so, Noah Kahan is a folk artist who is on a very big tour right now. He was playing a show in Philadelphia over the weekend when a fan started smearing feces over the floor of Citizens Bank Park. There are videos if you’d like to watch them. I’m not linking to them because I’m mad I had to watch them to verify all of this. The best explanation I’ve seen from fans who were there is that one of the attendees may have just decided to shit themself instead of missing a song. This is, from what I can tell, a growing problem among extremely intense music fandoms.

Kahan put out a statement on X on Saturday, writing, “If you have to poop at a show please dear god just go to the bathroom lmao. I’ve pooped my pants as much as the next 29 year old, but you guys gotta understand there’s a venue worker out there with a 1000 yard stare after dealing with that.”

He also made his fans at a show on Sunday make a pledge to not shit their pants and then wipe it all over the floor. Look, if this is what it takes to teach Gen Alpha and Gen Z how to behave normally at a concert, than that’s what we gotta do.

I assume you, like me, are hearing the “fahhh” sound effect everywhere right now. I was assuming there would be a concise origin for the sound effect, but apparently it comes from streamer Taileon, after a video of him saying “fuck” was uploaded to TikTok last summer.

It has since been added to a whole bunch of Capcut templates and spread out from there. That’s it! That’s the whole deal lol.

P.S. here’s a good Instagram video.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***