A Google security engineer, Michele Spagnuolo, was arrested and charged with alleged insider trading by betting on Polymarket on what Google users were searching for, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
According to a complaint unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Spagnuolo used “material nonpublic information” to bet on who would be on Google’s list of most searched for people for 2025, after Polymarket began offering these markets last fall.
Spagnuolo allegedly used an internal Google tool to track who the most wanted people were and transferred some $3.8 million in USDC to a Polymarket address, says the complaint, signed by FBI Special Agent Brandon Racz.
The account, which used the username “AlphaRaccoon,” bet that D4vd (a rapper recently accused of murdering a 14-year-old girl) would be one of the most wanted individuals in late November. Spagnuolo allegedly accessed Google’s internal tool, which showed the D4vd trend, a few hours before the AlphaRaccoon account placed the bet.
User AlphaRaccoon transferred 5 million USDC.e from his Polymarket account to a wallet, before transferring the funds through an exchange service and privacy tool, the complaint states. Some of the funds were eventually transferred to an account with a payment processor in Italy, which had been opened by someone using Michele Spagnuolo’s government ID card.
“Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these bets before the public because he had access to Google’s confidential and commercially valuable internal data,” the complaint states. “Spagnuolo personally profited more than approximately $1,200,000 from his transactions based on non-public information. Once he won, Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal his illegal use of non-public information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his illegal proceeds.”
Spagnuolo is accused of commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, according to the complaint.
Wednesday’s charges mark the second major arrest of someone who allegedly traded on Polymarket using inside information, following the earlier arrest of a U.S. Army soldier who allegedly bet on Nicolas Maduro’s raid he was participating in.
