Google Engineer Accused of Insider Trading on Prediction Platform

Google Engineer Accused of Insider Trading on Prediction Platform">

A Google engineer has been arrested and charged with breaking insider trading laws for allegedly using his access to company information to place successful bets on the prediction platform Polymarket. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the charges against Michele Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen living in Switzerland, who was brought before a federal judge in New York on Wednesday. Spagnuolo, who has worked at Google for over 12 years as an engineer focused on information security, allegedly used internal information to make bets that earned him $1.2m in winnings.

The internal information he accessed, which was marketing material, was obtained through a tool available to all employees. However, using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of Google's policies, according to a company spokeswoman. The US Attorney's office worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) on Spagnuolo's arrest.

He has been released on a $2.25m bond. According to online profiles, Spagnuolo started using Polymarket in 2024 and placed $2.7m in bets related to Google between October and December of last year. By using internal information, he was able to make more than $1m in profits from those bets.

The court papers revealed that Spagnuolo's most lucrative alleged Polymarket wins included correctly predicting who would and would not be the most searched for person on Google in 2025. He allegedly placed bets against names like Bianca Censori and President Donald Trump, and chose the singer D4vd as taking the top spot when the betting platform had odds of that result being near zero. At the time he placed the bet in November, Spagnuolo knew that D4vd had become Google's most-searched person because he had access to information the search giant had collected before it was released to the public.

A spokeswoman for Google said the company was working with law enforcement on their investigation and that Spagnuolo had been placed on leave. A spokesman for Polymarket said the platform worked closely with authorities on the investigation, adding that blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints. D4vd, a musician, is currently in jail for allegedly murdering a teenage girl.

Spagnuolo did not respond to an email seeking comment. The FBI linked his accounts by finding one he had opened with an Italian identification card, which was used to trade under the account name AlphaRaccoon on Polymarket with cryptocurrency from several accounts.