A long-time Google engineer was arrested on Wednesday and charged with using internal company information to make more than $1.2m in profits on Polymarket bets tied to Google. Michele Spagnuolo, who worked at the company for more than 12 years, was brought before a federal judge in New York after prosecutors said he broke insider trading laws.
The case has become urgent because it puts a criminal charge on conduct that prosecutors say moved from workplace access to real-money betting. Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, had started using Polymarket in 2024 and, between October and December of last year, allegedly placed $2.7m in bets related to Google. The most profitable wagers, court papers said, came from correctly predicting who would and would not be the most searched-for person on Google in 2025.
One of those bets was on the singer D4vd. Prosecutors said Spagnuolo chose D4vd to take the top spot when the odds were near zero, and that when he placed the bet in November he already knew D4vd had become Google’s most-searched person because he had access to information collected by the company before it was released to the public. He also allegedly placed bets against names including Bianca Censori and President Donald Trump.
The evidence prosecutors laid out is unusually specific. They said the trades produced $1.2m in winnings, were traced through blockchain records, and were linked by the FBI to an account Spagnuolo had opened with an Italian identification card. He allegedly traded under the name AlphaRaccoon and used cryptocurrency from several accounts, a method that matters because Polymarket accepts crypto as its only currency.
Google said it was working with law enforcement and had placed the employee on leave. A spokeswoman said the information involved was marketing material accessed using a tool available to all employees, but said using such confidential information to place bets was a serious breach of company policy. Polymarket said it had worked closely with authorities, and a spokesman said blockchain trading is transparent, traceable and leaves footprints.
That leaves the case with one question that matters now: how far prosecutors will go in spelling out exactly which Google information was used and whether any additional charges follow. For now, the arrest has turned a private betting windfall into a public test of how closely workplace data, prediction markets and criminal law can collide.
