Google Security an engineer has been charged with a crime arising from alleged trading Polymarket using confidential internal information from a large technology company. Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen, he was arrested this morning in New York, as first reported by ABC News.
Spagnuolo is charged with one count each of product fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. He has worked at Google since 2014 and was based out of the company’s offices in Zurich, Switzerland.
According to the complaint, Spagnuolo traded on Polymarket from October 2025 to December 2025 using internal Google data. In one event, he made a $1.2 million trade on who Google’s most searched person of the year will be in 2025, correctly predicting who the winner would be. D4vda singer whose whereabouts were once unknown, who began to be heavily scrutinized by the public after being suspected of being involved in a murder. (D4vd was eventually charged in the case in April.)
“Unlike his business partners, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these bets before the business public did because he had access to Google’s confidential and commercially valuable internal data,” FBI agent Brandon Racz wrote in the complaint.
This is the second time he has been arrested in the United States for illegal activity on the prediction markets. In April, a US Army special forces officer he was arrested for allegedly placing bets on markets related to the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Both cases have been brought by the Southern District of New York.
OpenAI dismiss the employee earlier this year for using inside information to trade on a prediction platform, but this is the first time a tech worker has been arrested for their alleged activities.
Polymarket has arrived under fire from lawmakers for its reputation as a hub of illegal activity. Last week, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform James Comer was launched surveys about internal trading on predictive marketing platforms and request information from Polymarket about how the company surveys its customers. There are two versions of Polymarket: a smaller platform that is legal in the US, and a larger offshore version that is technically restricted in the US and where traders use cryptocurrency to place their bets.
“We are working with law enforcement on their investigation. An employee accessed our marketing materials using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place a bet is a serious violation of our policies. We have placed the employee on leave and will take appropriate action,” Google spokeswoman Jaclyn Vazquez said in a statement to Wired.
“Polymarket worked closely with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the CFTC, and is the only forecasting platform to date whose partnership has resulted in insider trading payments in the United States,” Polymarket spokesperson Connor Brandi told WIRED. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave a trail. We are committed to maintaining accurate, fair and transparent markets as well as enforcing our laws and working with our regulators and law enforcement.” In a social media post, Polymarket he said his arrest was based on an appeal sent to the authorities.
Anyone can monitor transactions on Polymarket’s primary cryptomarket platform, as all wallet transactions are public. Spagnuolo allegedly conducted his business using an account with the username AlphaRaccoon, which Polymarket watchers had long speculated might belong to a Google insider, as the likelihood of accurately predicting the answers to the questions he played was impossible.
Earlier this month, Michael Selig, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is responsible for regulating market forecasts in the United States, told WIRED that the agency. he was using intelligence tools for hunting market manipulation and insider trading in the industry.
