Google employee charged with using inside information to make $1M on Polymarket

A Google employee fraudulently made more than $1 million by using inside information to place Polymarket bets on what users were searching for on Google, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday in New York. 

For Michele Spagnuolo, these were sure bets because, as a Google software engineer, he had access to company data that tracked user searches, according to the complaint, which said Spagnuolo “misappropriated confidential and valuable nonpublic information from his employer and used that information to place a series of Google-related bets on Polymarket, a prediction market platform.”

Spagnuolo, 36, is charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering.

“Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data,” the complaint said.  

He correctly bet — using an account under the name AlphaRaccoon — that Google’s most-searched person in 2025 would be the singer known as D4vd, according to the complaint. At the time he placed that bet, the prediction market Polymarket “assigned a near-zero probability to d4vd being ‘the #1 searched person on Google this year,'” the complaint said.

After Google publicly announced its Year in Search 2025 results on Dec. 4, 2025, Spagnuolo’s AlphaRaccoon account profited $1.2 million on his Google Year in Search 2025-related bets, federal prosecutors said.

“Once he won, Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds,” the complaint said.

Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen, was arrested Wednesday morning in New York, where he appeared briefly before a federal magistrate judge.

He did not enter a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond, secured by $1 million cash, $50,000 of which needs to be posted Wednesday. 

A Google spokesperson, responding to the charges against Spagnuolo, said in a statement, “We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation. The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”

This is the second case involving prediction markets that the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has brought this year.

A U.S. special forces soldier, Gannon Van Dyke, pleaded not guilty last month to making fraudulent bets on Polymarket about the raid that ousted Nicholas Maduro from Venezuela. Van Dyke was positioned to know about the raid because he helped to plan it and took part in it, prosecutors said.