The Google worker allegedly used internal company data to inform his predictions bets he placed on Polymarket.
A Google employee has been arrested for allegedly using access to internal company data to successfully place valuable prediction bets through Polymarket.
Michele Spagnuolo, an engineer for Google, has been charged with breaking insider trading laws by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the BBC reported.
The most lucrative of these bets were in predicting who would be the most searched for person on Google in 2025 – with Spagnuolo placing bets against Donald Trump and Bianca Censori, and choosing singer D4vid to take the top spot.
Court papers confirmed Spagnuolo placed this bet in November, when he knew that D4vid would be the most searched person because he had access to information from Google before it was released to the general public.
The bets saw Spagnuolo win over £894,300 ($1.2m), allegedly using early access to information through his employment at Google.
A Google spokesperson said the employee had been placed on leave and it was “working with law enforcement on their investigation”.
The information that was allegedly used was marketing material accessed “using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies”, they added.
The predictions were placed using cryptocurrency and Blockchain, which is traceable. Spagnuolo reportedly operated the Polymarket account under the name AlphaRacoon, with several linked cryptocurrency accounts – which the FBI said it was able to trace through one account he had opened using his italian identification card.
Spagnuolo started using Polymarket in 2024, and the US Attorney’s office confirmed that between October 2025 and December 2025, he placed over £2m (approximately $2.7n) in bets related to Google.
