A Google employee allegedly used insider info to manipulate Polymarket bets

• Federal prosecutors charged a Google engineer with insider trading after he allegedly used confidential search trend data to win over $1.2 million on Polymarket.
• Authorities say the employee secretly accessed nonpublic Google “Year in Search” data and placed highly accurate bets under the alias “AlphaRaccoon.”
• Investigators flagged a near-impossible prediction involving artist D4vd becoming Google’s most searched person in 2025.

As a Google software engineer just found out the hard way, treating confidential company data as your own personal cheat code is a guaranteed path to federal indictment.

Federal prosecutors have charged Michele Spagnuolo with insider trading for allegedly using confidential Google search data to make more than $1.2 million on Polymarket, ABC News reports. According to a criminal complaint unsealed in New York, the 36-year-old Google employee and Italian citizen living in Switzerland allegedly gained access to nonpublic Google information and used it to place highly accurate bets under the alias “AlphaRaccoon.” Prosecutors said the bets were tied to Google search trends and rankings for “Year in Search” that had not yet been made public.