Google engineer charged with insider trading after making $1.2 million on Polymarket bets
A Google software engineer has been charged with using confidential search data to place bets on Polymarket markets tied to Google’s 2025 Year in Search results, allegedly making more than $1.2 million in profit.
Michele Spagnuolo, also known as “AlphaRaccoon,” was charged in a criminal complaint in federal court in Manhattan with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. Polymarket said he was arrested in New York on Wednesday morning.
The complaint, first obtained by ABC News and Axios, says Spagnuolo has worked as a software engineer at Google since around 2014 and had access to an internal Google tool containing confidential Year in Search data, including top trending search results before they were released to the public.
Prosecutors said Spagnuolo used that information from October to December 2025 to trade on Polymarket, a prediction market platform where users buy and sell shares tied to the outcome of future events.
The markets included whether specific people would be the “#1 searched person on Google” in 2025 or rank among the top five most searched people, according to the complaint. They were set to resolve based on Google’s public Year in Search release.
The complaint says Spagnuolo accessed Google’s confidential Year in Search data on October 15 and again on November 27. By late November, Google’s internal data showed that d4vd had replaced Kendrick Lamar as the top trending person of the year, prosecutors said.
About three hours after the November access, Spagnuolo’s AlphaRaccoon account placed bets on d4vd ranking in the top five and being the No. 1 searched person on Google, even though the market assigned near-zero odds to the latter outcome, according to the complaint.
Prosecutors said the account also placed large bets against other outcomes, including whether Bianca Censori, Pope Leo XIV or Donald Trump would be the No. 1 searched person on Google in 2025.
In all, the AlphaRaccoon account risked about $2.75 million across roughly 25 Google Year in Search outcomes that the market treated as unlikely, according to the complaint.
Google publicly released its 2025 Year in Search results on December 4. Soon after, prosecutors said, the AlphaRaccoon account profited about $1.2 million from the related bets.
The complaint says Spagnuolo later took steps to conceal the proceeds, including moving funds through cryptocurrency wallets and services after online communities on Discord and X speculated that AlphaRaccoon may have been a Google insider.
“Proud to announce Polymarket’s market integrity infrastructure flagged another trader who was arrested this morning in New York for insider trading, Polymarket said in a statement. “With 2 out of 2 arrests in this industry resulting from our criminal referrals, Polymarket has emerged as the enforcement leader. Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
