DOJ charges Google engineer with $1.2M Polymarket insider trade using search data
The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo, 36, with wire fraud and money laundering over an alleged insider trading scheme on Polymarket. Prosecutors say Spagnuolo used confidential Google search data to place profitable bets, including a wager on whether accused killer D4vd would become Google's most-searched person of 2025, earning approximately $1.2 million through an account called AlphaRaccoon. Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen living in Switzerland, now stands to lose millions in Google stock grants tied to his employment. The case, brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, marks one of the first criminal enforcement actions specifically targeting insider trading on a crypto-native prediction market platform using misappropriated corporate information.
Polymarket faces its first federal insider-trading prosecution, putting the platform's surveillance of employee-traders at every major tech company under immediate DOJ scrutiny. Any failure to detect or deter similar data exploits could draw the CFTC into a parallel market-integrity investigation.
Gives the DOJ and CFTC a second live misappropriation template against prediction market platforms in under three days, after the Van Dyke charging, making Polymarket the common thread in back-to-back federal insider-trading prosecutions.