Google Engineer Charged With $1.2 Million Polymarket Insider Trade Using Internal Search Data

Federal prosecutors charged Michele Spagnuolo, a Google staff information security engineer with more than 12 years at the company, on Wednesday with using confidential internal company data to make approximately $1.2 million trading on Polymarket markets that predicted Google‘s most-searched person of 2025.

Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian citizen residing in Switzerland, was arrested in New York Wednesday morning. He was charged in a complaint unsealed in the Southern District of New York with commodities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and other counts, and was released on a $2.25 million bond. “Insider trading compromises the integrity of our markets, and the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted,” said Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

The trades happened on a Polymarket account using the handle “AlphaRaccoon”, later associated with the on-chain wallet “0xafEe”, which observers had flagged as suspicious back in December for an unusually accurate run on Google search trend contracts.

According to the complaint, Spagnuolo made 16 transfers to Polymarket between October and December 2025, accessing an internal Google tool that tracked which celebrities were the most-searched globally.

In one wager, he placed a $381.12 “yes” bet that singer d4vd would rank in the most-searched people of 2025 when public markets gave d4vd a roughly 0.2% implied probability, netting approximately $200,000 when the artist landed at number one. He also bet $613,000 “no” against Pope Leo being the most-searched person of the year, despite the pope’s elevated public visibility implying high odds, and won. Across all bets, Spagnuolo transferred roughly $3.8 million in USDC to Polymarket, risked $2.7 million in wagers, and profited approximately $1.2 million.

Olivia Chalos, Polymarket‘s chief legal officer, said it “is the only prediction platform to date whose cooperation has led to insider trading charges in the United States,” noting that because users trade in crypto, activity is “transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints.”

Google said in a statement that Spagnuolo “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,” adding that Spagnuolo has been placed on leave.

The CFTC filed a parallel civil case on Wednesday seeking monetary disgorgement, restitution, and other penalties. The case is the second federal insider trading prosecution involving Polymarket. Last month, prosecutors charged U.S. Army soldier Gannon Van Dyke with using nonpublic knowledge of the planned military operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to make roughly $400,000 in Polymarket profits. The cases land amid intensifying federal scrutiny of prediction markets: the House Oversight Committee opened a broader insider trading probe last week, and the CFTC filed suit against Minnesota the same week over its prediction markets ban.