Google Engineer Charged in $1.2M Polymarket Insider Trading Scheme Using Search Data]

Federal prosecutors have charged a Google employee with fraud, alleging he made over $1 million through insider trading on Polymarket using confidential company data.

Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google, was charged with money laundering, commodities fraud, and wire fraud in a complaint unsealed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York. According to authorities, Spagnuolo used confidential information to place winning bets on Polymarket predicting that singer d4vd would be Google’s most searched person in 2025.

The complaint states that Spagnuolo had access to Google’s internal data systems, including a proprietary tool that provided access to confidential Year in Search data. Prosecutors allege he used the alias “AlphaRaccoon” to place suspicious trades on the prediction market platform as early as December 2025, with profits of approximately $1.2 million coming shortly after Google’s public announcement of its Year in Search results.

Spagnuolo was arrested Wednesday morning and appeared before a federal magistrate judge, where he was released on a $2.25 million bond without entering a plea. Google confirmed it placed the employee on leave, stating that while the employee accessed marketing materials through a tool available to all staff, using such confidential information for betting constituted a serious policy violation.

The case represents only the second high-profile insider trading charges involving Polymarket in recent months, following the arrest of a U.S. Army Special Forces veteran in April for allegedly using classified information to profit from bets related to Venezuela’s president.

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