The curious thing was that these bets were so consistent. It’s not unusual for an article or tweet to come out and temporarily create unexpected wagers. But day after day, month after month, people were betting on these weird theories. Every six months, a new version of the Clinton-indictment bet came up, and every six months, people bet that she would be charged.

That’s when Cage started paying attention to the PredictIt comments sections, where people were posting snippets of what looked like nonsense to him. And that’s how, years before most people had heard of QAnon, Cage learned that Q is an anonymous figure who claims to have a high-level security clearance and access to inside information about a devil-worshipping deep state.

All of a sudden, the bets made sense: QAnon followers believed that Q had special inside information about the future, and they bet accordingly.

“There were people who were so convicted in these beliefs that they were willing to put hundreds or thousands on the line,” Cage said. “So I started shoveling more and more money in.”