GoKawiilThe US charged a Google software engineer with insider trading after he allegedly made a profit of $1.2 million on Polymarket bets related to which public figures would top Google’s rankings for the most searched names in 2025. Michele Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, “was arrested on Wednesday and brought before a federal judge in New York,” the BBC wrote.
Spagnuolo was charged “with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering arising from his scheme to misappropriate confidential information from his employer and use that information to place a series of profitable Google-related trades on a prediction market platform,” the Justice Department announced yesterday.
An unsealed criminal complaint said that Spagnuolo, using the account name “AlphaRaccoon” on Polymarket, made bets on who would be the most-searched people on Google in 2025. “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.
Spagnuolo had access to internal Google systems, including a software tool with “confidential, nonpublic Year in Search data,” FBI Special Agent Brandon Racz wrote in the complaint. Spagnuolo allegedly bet over $2.7 million and made a $1.2 million profit after Google publicly announced its Year in Search 2025 results in early December. He also apparently made over $1 million on other profitable bets on Polymarket, but the FBI didn’t say what those other bets were for.
Google says he used “tool available to all employees”
Google said it suspended the employee and is cooperating with law enforcement.