A Google software engineer was charged Wednesday with using confidential company information to make more than $1.2 million on Polymarket in the second major criminal case related to trading on the prediction market platform.
Michele Spagnulo, 36, an Italian citizen living in Switzerland, is charged with one count each of commodity fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, according to a federal complaint unsealed in New York.
Prosecutors accuse Spagnulo of placing a series of bets from October to December based on Google’s internal search data that tracked user searches.
“Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnulo knew the outcome of these bets before the public because he had access to Google’s confidential and commercially valuable internal data,” the complaint alleges.
Spagnulo did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.
Spagnulo, under the username “AlphaRacoon,” won more than $1.2 million after correctly betting that D4vd, singer accused of murdering teenage girlwould be Google’s most searched person of the year in 2025, according to court documents.
When Spagnulo bet on D4vd, the prediction market “assigned a near-zero probability” that the singer was the most searched person on Google, prosecutors wrote.
“Once he won, Spagnulo then took deliberate steps to conceal his illegal use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his illegal products,” according to the complaint.
A Google spokesperson said the company was cooperating with law enforcement.
“The employee accessed our marketing materials using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets constitutes a serious violation of our policies,” the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the employee has since been placed on leave.
A Polymarket spokesperson said in a statement that it was “the only prediction platform to date whose cooperation has led to accusations of insider trading in the United States.”
“We are committed to maintaining accurate, fair and transparent markets, enforcing our rules and working with our regulators and law enforcement,” the spokesperson said.
In April, federal authorities arrested and charged US special forces soldier using classified information about the raid that removed Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro from office to place bets on Polymarket. The trooper, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, has pleaded not guilty to federal charges.
In a statement Wednesday, Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, derided “greed-motivated” insider trading, saying it “compromises the integrity of our markets.”
“The charges brought today reinforce a decades-old message: business executives cannot use confidential business information to make profits in our markets,” he said.
