US authorities have charged a Google engineer accused of secretly using access rights to Google search trend data to place bets on the online prediction platform Polymarket, earning profits exceeding 1.2 million US dollars, or over 39 million baht.
The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), announced the arrest and indictment of 36-year-old Michele Spagnuolo, a software engineer at Google, on charges of commodity fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Investigations found he used confidential internal company data to place bets on the prediction market platform, earning total winnings of over 1.2 million US dollars, approximately 39 million baht.
Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen residing in Switzerland, was arrested on 27 May and brought before a federal court in New York City, where he was granted temporary bail set at as high as 2.25 million US dollars.
The indictment states that Spagnuolo, who had worked as an information security engineer at Google for over 12 years, abused his position to access internal marketing tools available to all employees. However, he used unreleased user search statistics data to place bets related to Google on the Polymarket platform from October to December last year, totaling over 2.7 million US dollars.
Court documents reveal that his most lucrative bet was predicting "who would be the most searched person on Google in 2025." Using the anonymous account "AlphaRaccoon," Spagnuolo bet against well-known figures such as Bianca Censori and former President Donald Trump, instead choosing to predict that "David" (D4vd), a popular singer currently accused in a teenage murder case, would be the top search winner.
At the time, Polymarket's system assessed the chances of this singer ranking first as "almost zero," but Spagnuolo already knew by November that David's search volume had surged to number one because he had seen Google's raw database before it was made public.
The indictment states, "Spagnuolo knew the betting outcome before the public because he accessed confidential Google business information. After winning the bets, he attempted to conceal the source of funds by transferring cryptocurrency assets through multiple accounts."
Although Polymarket operates using cryptocurrency and anonymous accounts, the FBI conducted in-depth investigations and linked these accounts back to Spagnuolo's true identity after discovering that one account used an Italian identity card for verification.
A Polymarket spokesperson stated the platform cooperated closely with law enforcement and is the first prediction market platform where such cooperation led to an insider trading-related arrest. They emphasized, "Blockchain transactions are transparent and traceable; bad actors always leave footprints."
A Google spokesperson confirmed the company is cooperating with police investigations and that the employee has been suspended. They noted that although the tool is accessible to all employees, using confidential data for personal gain and betting is a serious violation of company policy.
Spagnuolo's case is the second major criminal case involving insider information use on the Polymarket platform. Previously, in April, US authorities arrested Staff Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a US Special Forces soldier, on charges of using classified military information about an operation to oust Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to place bets on the same platform. He continues to deny the charges.