The Situation Room sign at Polymarket pop-up bar on Friday, March 20, 2026 in Washington, DC, USA.
Graham Sloan | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Federal prosecutors on Wednesday indicted a Google employee on fraud charges for allegedly making $1.2 million in bets using Polymarket insider information.
Prosecutors allege that Michele Spagnuolo, a Google information security engineer, used confidential information to make the right deal by betting that singer d4vd would be the most searched person on Google in 2025.
Mr. Spagnuolo is charged with money laundering, merchandise fraud and wire fraud. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, was unsealed Wednesday.
ABC News first reported the complaint. Spagnuolo was arrested in New York on Wednesday morning, ABC reported.
“Mr. Spagnuolo had access to Google’s internal data systems, including certain internal Google software tools that provided access to sensitive, non-public search data,” prosecutors said in the complaint.
Some observers of the Polymarket platform flagged user “AlphaRaccoon” in December for suspicious transactions regarding the most searched personal contracts. Wednesday’s complaint listed Spagnuolo as the person behind the account.
“Google formally and publicly announced its 2025 search results on or about December 4, 2025. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Spagnuolo’s AlphaRaccoon account profited from approximately $1.2 million in bets related to Google’s 2025 search,” the complaint states.
Spagnuolo appeared in court Wednesday before a federal judge but did not enter a plea and was released on $2.25 million bail, ABC reported.
Google said in a statement: “We are cooperating with law enforcement agencies in the investigation.” “The employee accessed our marketing materials using tools available to all employees, and using such confidential information to place bets is a serious violation of our policies.”
The company added: “The employee will be placed on administrative leave and appropriate measures will be taken.”
“Polymarket works closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the CFTC, and to date is the only predictive platform whose collaboration has led to insider trading charges in the United States,” a Polymarket spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to maintaining accurate, fair and transparent markets, as well as enforcing the rules and cooperating with regulators and law enforcement.”
Mr. Spagnuolo also faces a civil lawsuit from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to a listing in the federal court filing system.
The federal complaint is the second high-profile insider trading case at Polymarket in just over a month.
In April, then-active-duty U.S. Army Special Forces Sergeant Major Gannon Ken Van Dyke was arrested on charges of using classified information to bet on contracts related to the U.S. military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Prosecutors said Van Dyke made more than $400,000 from the trades.
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