GoKawiilEdgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR Federal prosecutors charged a Google engineer with insider trading after he allegedly used confidential search trend data to win over $1.2 million on Polymarket.
Authorities say the employee secretly accessed nonpublic Google “Year in Search” data and placed highly accurate bets under the alias “AlphaRaccoon.”
Investigators flagged a near-impossible prediction involving artist D4vd becoming Google’s most searched person in 2025.
As a Google software engineer just found out the hard way, treating confidential company data as your own personal cheat code is a guaranteed path to federal indictment.
Federal prosecutors have charged Michele Spagnuolo with insider trading for allegedly using confidential Google search data to make more than $1.2 million on Polymarket, ABC News reports. According to a criminal complaint unsealed in New York, the 36-year-old Google employee and Italian citizen living in Switzerland allegedly gained access to nonpublic Google information and used it to place highly accurate bets under the alias “AlphaRaccoon.” Prosecutors said the bets were tied to Google search trends and rankings for “Year in Search” that had not yet been made public.
Authorities say Spagnuolo wagered about $2.75 million and turned those trades into about $1.2 million in profits. One of the largest red flags was a strangely accurate prediction that indie artist D4vd would be the most searched person on Google in 2025, which prosecutors say could not have been reasonably predicted using public information alone.
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Investigators claim Spagnuolo also correctly wagered on which celebrities and public figures would and wouldn’t make Google’s annual trending search rankings. The complaint said he exploited internal Google systems to gain an unfair advantage before the data became public.
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