Google Employee Faces Charges for Insider Trading on Polymarket
A Google engineer has been accused of making over $1 million by using confidential company data to place betting wagers on Polymarket, leading to charges of commodities fraud and money laundering.
A Google employee has been charged with fraud after allegedly using insider information to profit over $1 million on Polymarket, a prediction market platform. Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old software engineer, accessed confidential data regarding user search trends to make informed bets, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed in New York.
The complaint details that Spagnuolo improperly used proprietary information, placing wagers under the alias AlphaRaccoon. He accurately predicted that the singer D4vd would be the most-searched individual on Google in 2025, despite Polymarket assigning a low probability to this outcome at the time. Following Google's official announcement of its Year in Search 2025 results, Spagnuolo's bets yielded a profit of $1.2 million.
Federal prosecutors claim that Spagnuolo attempted to disguise the origins and ownership of his illicit gains after his wins. He was arrested on Wednesday and appeared in court, where he was released on a $2.25 million bond, requiring $1 million in cash as part of the terms. In response to the allegations, a Google spokesperson stated that the employee has been placed on leave and emphasized that betting using company data represents a significant breach of policy. This incident marks the second time this year that the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York has pursued a case related to Polymarket.