A Google techie has been arrested and charged with fraud and money laundering after he allegedly earned $1.2 million (Rs 11.5 crore) by illegally trading contracts on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market. The accused Googler, identified as Michele Spagnuolo, 36, bet on who would be revealed as the most searched person of 2025, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed on Wednesday (May 27).
Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen, worked at Google since 2014 and was based out of the company’s Zurich, Switzerland, offices. He placed the trades on Polymarket from around October 2025 to December 2025 using internal Google data that tracked user searches, as per a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The complaint highlighted that Spagnuolo “misappropriated confidential and valuable nonpublic information from his employee” and used the said information to place a series of Google-related bets.
“Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data,” the complaint stated.
Spagnuolo correctly predicted that the winner of Google’s most-searched person of the year 2025 would be D4vd, an American singer, who has been accused of murdering 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. At the time of his bet, Polymarket had assigned a near-zero probability to D4vd being the top search, but Spagnuolo’s account under the name, AlphaRaccoon, managed to get it right.
Responding to the charges, a Google spokesperson said: “We’re working with law enforcement on their investigation. The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”
US Soldier’s Polymarket Bet
In April, a US special forces soldier was accused of betting on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s capture before the information was publicly available. On the basis of classified information, Gannon Ken Van Dyke, 38, allegedly made trades on Polymarket, winning more than $400,000.
Dyke pleaded not guilty to charges that he used classified information to profit when arraigned in New York federal court. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged him with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of non-public government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud and making an unlawful monetary transaction.