(Bloomberg) — A Google software engineer was charged with insider trading on Polymarket, where he allegedly made more than $1 million betting on one of last year’s most popular Internet searches.
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Michele Spagnuolo was charged in a complaint unsealed Wednesday in federal court in New York. Spagnuolo, 36, appeared before a federal magistrate and was released on a $2.25 million bond.
A lawyer for Spagnuolo didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment on the charges.
The case comes amid growing concern about insider trading on prediction markets. The charges against Spagnuolo come just a little more than a month after a US Army Special Forces master sergeant was charged with using classified information about the operation to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to make $400,000 betting on Polymarket.
According to the complaint, Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen who joined Alphabet Inc.’s Google in 2014, had access to company data that tracked user searches when he bet that Google’s most-searched person in 2025 would be the singer D4vd. Last month, D4vd, whose real name is David Anthony Burke, was charged with murdering a 14-year-old girl. He has pleaded not guilty.
At the time, Polymarket assigned a “near-zero probability” that D4vd would be the top-ranked search over figures like Pope Leo XIV and Kendrick Lamar, prosecutors said. When D4vd was publicly announced as the top-searched person in December, Spagnuolo allegedly made around $1.2 million.
“We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “The employee 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. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”
Prosecutors said Spagnuolo, who traded on Polymarket under the username “AlphaRaccoon,” also sought to cover up his bets with a service that adds privacy protection to cryptocurrency transactions, according to the complaint. His account vanished from the market after users on X and Discord speculated that it had been used by a Google insider to trade ahead of the search results announcement, prosecutors said.
