Google Engineer Michele Spagnuolo Charged Over $1.2 Million Polymarket Insider Betting Scheme
A Google employee has been charged in New York with insider trading, following allegations he exploited confidential company information to amass over $1.2 million through bets placed on the prediction platform Polymarket.
Michele Spagnuolo, a Google engineer, was arrested on Wednesday and presented before a federal judge in New York, despite being an Italian citizen residing in Switzerland. Prosecutors from the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York assert Spagnuolo leveraged early access to internal Google data, based in the US, to inform his betting strategy.
A Google spokeswoman confirmed the company's cooperation with law enforcement and stated the employee has been placed on leave. She noted that while Spagnuolo accessed marketing material using a tool available to all employees, "using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies." Polymarket's spokesman indicated the platform "worked closely" with authorities, adding that "blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints."
Investigations by the US Attorney's office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) linked Spagnuolo, allegedly trading as 'AlphaRaccoon', to several cryptocurrency accounts through an Italian identification card. Released on a $2.25 million bond, Spagnuolo's online profiles suggest over a decade as a Google information security engineer.
According to court documents, Spagnuolo began using Polymarket in 2024, placing $2.7 million in Google-related bets between October and December of last year, generating over $1 million in profits. His most significant alleged wins included correctly predicting the most searched person on Google for 2025. He reportedly bet against prominent figures like Bianca Censori and Donald Trump, selecting musician D4vd as the top search when platform odds were near zero. Prosecutors allege Spagnuolo possessed non-public information from Google confirming D4vd's status as the most-searched person at the time he placed this bet in November.
