Google employee accused of using internal data and making $1 million from bets

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A Google employee was arrested for allegedly using his access to internal company information to successfully place lucrative bets on the prediction market platform Polymarket.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said he has charged Google engineer Michele Spagnuolo with violating insider trading laws because of several bets he made through the platform.
Although Spagnuolo is an Italian citizen living in Switzerland, he was arrested on Wednesday (27/05) and taken before a federal judge in New York.
Spagnuolo allegedly used information he had early access to through his work at US-based Google to place bets that netted him winnings of US$1.2 million (about R$6 million).
A Google spokeswoman said the company is "cooperating with authorities in their investigation" and that the employee has been placed on leave.
Inside information that would have been used consisted of marketing material accessed "using a tool available to all employees, but using this confidential information to place bets is a serious violation of our policies," he added.
A spokesperson for Polymarket said the platform "worked closely" with authorities on the investigation.
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"Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave traces," the spokesperson added.
Blockchain is a kind of digital ledger applied to cryptocurrencies, which are the only form of payment that Polymarket accepts.
The US Attorney's Office worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Spagnuolo's arrest. He was released on $2.25 million bail, according to ABC News.
Although Spagnuolo allegedly used the username AlphaRaccoon on Polymarket and his bets were made with cryptocurrencies from multiple accounts, the FBI said it detected his accounts by finding one he had opened with an Italian ID.
Spagnuolo did not respond to an email seeking comment.
According to online profiles, he worked at Google for more than 12 years as engineer focused on information security.
He began using Polymarket in 2024, and between October and December of last year, the U.S. attorney's office said Spagnuolo made $2.7 million in Google-related bets.
By using inside information, he was able to make more than $1 million in profits from those bets, according to the office.
Court documents say the most profitable bets Spagnuolo allegedly made at Polymarket were to correctly predict who would be and who wouldn't be the most Googled person in 2025.
He allegedly bet against the likes of Bianca Censori and President Donald Trump, and picked singer D4vd as first place when the betting platform was assigning near-zero odds to that outcome.
Court documents say that when Spagnuolo made that bet in November, he knew that D4vd had become the most Googled person because he had access to information the search giant had collected before they are released to the public.
D4vd is currently in prison for allegedly murdering a teenager.
We used artificial intelligence to translate this report, originally written in English. The text was reviewed by a BBC journalist before publication. Find out more here about how the BBC is using artificial intelligence (link to text in English).
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