Google security engineer charged with $1.2M Polymarket bet using internal search data

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have charged Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google, with wire fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering. The complaint alleges he tapped an internal tool containing confidential Year in Search 2025 data to place winning Polymarket bets — most notably that singer d4vd would top the year’s most-searched persons list — netting roughly $1.2 million through an account known as AlphaRaccoon. The CFTC has filed a parallel civil insider trading action.

Spagnuolo was arrested in New York and released on a $2.25 million bond. Google said the marketing data was accessible to all employees via a standard tool but called the trading a serious policy breach, and has placed him on leave. Polymarket flagged its cooperation with the SDNY and CFTC, noting this is the first U.S. insider trading prosecution stemming from a prediction market.

The case is the second high-profile Polymarket insider trading prosecution in roughly a month, following the April arrest of an Army Special Forces sergeant accused of betting on classified intelligence about a Venezuela operation. Together they suggest regulators are now treating prediction-market contracts as securities-like instruments where misuse of nonpublic information carries criminal exposure — and that internal access controls on seemingly innocuous marketing data deserve the same scrutiny as financial systems.