Google engineer Spagnuolo charged in $1.2M Polymarket insider-trading scheme
Federal prosecutors and the CFTC charged Google engineer Spagnuolo on May 27, 2026, with insider trading and fraud for allegedly using nonpublic Google search data to earn $1.2 million on Polymarket. The engineer traded under the account name AlphaRaccoon, placing $2.75 million in bets between October 2025 and May 2026 according to the Department of Justice. The CFTC filed a parallel complaint in Washington. Online sleuths on social media, including blockchain engineer Jeong on X, helped expose the scheme by flagging suspicious trading patterns in public blockchain data. The case marks one of the first insider-trading prosecutions tied to a crypto-native prediction market platform.
Pulls Polymarket back inside the CFTC's enforcement perimeter for the first time since the 2022 settlement, putting future product launches on the agency's pre-clearance track. The joint DOJ-CFTC action signals that nonpublic data from tech employers now qualifies as material information for event-contract prosecutions.
Second federal insider-trading prosecution hitting a prediction-market platform in under a week, after the Van Dyke case, with both DOJ and CFTC now deploying misappropriation theory against Polymarket specifically and event-contract surveillance gaps generally.