A Google security engineer, Michele Spagnuolo, was arrested and charged with alleged insider trading by placing bets on Polymarket about what Google users searched for, US officials claimed on Wednesday.
According to a complaint unsealed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Spagnuolo used “substantial non-public information” to place bets on who would appear on Google’s 2025 Most Wanted list after Polymarket began offering those markets last fall.
Spagnuolo allegedly used an internal Google tool to track who the most wanted people were and transferred about $3.8 million in USDC to a Polymarket address, according to the complaint, which was signed by FBI Special Agent Brandon Racz.
The account, using the username “AlphaRaccoon”, bet that D4vd (a rapper recently charged with murdering a 14-year-old girl) would be one of the most searched people at the end of November. Spagnuolo allegedly accessed Google’s internal tool, which showed D4vd trending, a few hours before the AlphaRaccoon account placed the bet.
User AlphaRaccoon moved 5 million USDC.e from their Polymarket account to a wallet before moving the funds through an exchange service and privacy tool, the complaint said. Some of the funds were ultimately moved to an account with a payment processor in Italy that had been opened by someone using Michele Spagnuolo’s government ID card.
“Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these bets before the trading public did because he had access to Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data,” the complaint states. “Spagnuolo personally made more than approximately $1,200,000 from his trades based on non-public information. Once he won, Spagnuolo then took deliberate steps to conceal his illegal use of non-public information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his illegal proceeds.”
According to the complaint, Spagnuolo is charged with commodity fraud, wire fraud and money laundering.
Wednesday’s indictment marks the second major arrest of someone who allegedly traded at Polymarket using insider information, following an earlier arrest of a US Army soldier who allegedly bet on the Nicolas Maduro raid he was part of.
