GoKawiilSignage at the Situation Room by Polymarket pop-up bar in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, March 20, 2026.
Federal prosecutors charged a Google employee with fraud on Wednesday, alleging that he made $1.2 million off of bets using insider information on Polymarket.
Prosecutors claim that Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google, used confidential information to place trades correctly betting that singer d4vd would be Google's most searched person in 2025.
Spagnuolo has been charged with money laundering, commodities fraud and wire fraud. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, was unsealed on Wednesday.
ABC News first reported on the complaint. Spagnuolo was arrested Wednesday morning in New York, ABC reported.
"Spagnuolo had access to Google's internal data systems, including a particular Google internal software tool that provided him access to confidential, nonpublic Year in Search data," the prosecutors said in their complaint.
Some observers of the Polymarket platform flagged the user "AlphaRaccoon" back in December for suspicious trades on the most searched person contracts. The complaint Wednesday said that Spagnuolo was the person behind that account.
"Google officially and publicly announced its Year in Search 2025 results on or about December 4, 2025. Soon after it did so, Spagnuolo's AlphaRaccoon account, profited approximately $1.2 million on his Google Year in Search 2025-related bets," the complaint said.
Spagnuolo appeared before a federal magistrate judge Wednesday, He did not enter a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond, ABC reported.
"We're working with law enforcement on their investigation," Google said in a statement. "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."
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