Google Security Engineer Charged With Insider Trading After Allegedly Using Internal Search Data to Win $1.2 Million on Polymarket

Federal prosecutors have charged a Google security engineer with insider trading, alleging he exploited confidential company data to win roughly $1.2 million on the prediction market Polymarket — the second time in two months that nonpublic information has surfaced at the center of a criminal case tied to the booming online betting platform.

Michele Spagnuolo, a staff information security engineer at Google, was charged this week with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, according to a complaint unsealed in federal court. Prosecutors say Spagnuolo had access to Google's internal data systems, including a tool that gave him a confidential, prerelease view of the company's "Year in Search" rankings — the closely guarded list of the most-searched people, events and terms that Google publishes at the end of each year.

Armed with that information, the complaint alleges, Spagnuolo placed roughly $2.7 million in wagers across 25 separate outcomes in Polymarket's market for Google's most-searched person of 2025, including a bet that the breakout musician d4vd would top the list. The trades netted about $1.2 million in profit. Investigators say Spagnuolo operated under the Polymarket username "AlphaRaccoon," an account that platform observers had publicly flagged back in December for suspiciously well-timed wagers on the most-searched-person contracts.

Spagnuolo appeared before a federal magistrate judge and was released on a $2.25 million bond, according to court records. A Google spokesperson did not immediately detail the engineer's employment status, and the company has previously said it cooperates with law enforcement on misuse of internal systems. The case underscores the growing tension between a workforce with privileged access to market-moving corporate data and a new generation of real-money prediction markets where that data can be quietly converted into cash.

The charges mark the second high-profile insider-trading case to hit Polymarket in just over a month. In April, federal authorities arrested Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant, accusing him of using classified information to bet on contracts tied to American operations involving Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Together, the cases have intensified scrutiny of prediction markets, which have surged in popularity and mainstream legitimacy over the past two years even as regulators and prosecutors warn that contracts pegged to corporate or government secrets create powerful new incentives for abuse. Legal analysts note that applying commodities-fraud statutes to event-contract betting is a relatively novel theory, and the outcome of the Spagnuolo prosecution could help define how insider-trading law reaches the fast-growing platforms.