A Google software engineer, Michele Spagnuolo, has been charged with fraud and money laundering for allegedly earning $1.2M by trading on Polymarket using nonpublic Google search data, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office. Prosecutors say Spagnuolo, a Google employee since 2014 based in Zurich, used the account name “AlphaRaccoon” to wager about $2.7M across 25 bets tied to Google's Year in Search results from October to December of last year, including a bet that musicians Kendrick Lamar and d4vd would finish in the top 5 of the most-searched people of 2025, at a time when public odds on d4vd were barely above 0%. The data is restricted to a limited number of Google employees. Google said Spagnuolo accessed marketing material available to all employees but called the alleged use of confidential information to place bets a serious breach of policy, and has placed him on leave. The same office charged an Army special-forces soldier last month with trading on nonpublic information about a U.S. military operation in Venezuela, in what was the first insider-trading case tied to Polymarket bets.
