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A Google software engineer has been arrested and charged with federal commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering after allegedly using confidential, pre-publication company data to rig lucrative wagers on the blockchain-based prediction platform Polymarket. Federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York unsealed a criminal complaint on Wednesday detailing how Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old staff information security engineer, weaponized internal Google data to pocket $1.2 million in illicit profits.
According to court filings, Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen based out of Google’s Zurich office, abused his elevated technical credentials between October and December of last year. He repeatedly accessed a proprietary internal software tool containing highly sensitive, nonpublic marketing material labeled “Google Confidential” to monitor live data for the tech giant’s highly anticipated “Year in Search” lists. Armed with this definitive look at what the world was searching for before the results were published on December 4, Spagnuolo operated under the anonymous Polymarket alias “AlphaRaccoon,” risking roughly $2.7 million across 23 different trend-based contracts.
The crown jewel of Spagnuolo’s insider trading scheme involved a high-stakes, hyper-specific bet on alt-pop singer-songwriter D4vd (David Burke). The artist’s name had experienced an unprecedented spike in global search traffic late last year following a widely discussed criminal case where he was subsequently charged with murder. Because the platform’s public users were entirely unaware of the back-end metric explosion, Polymarket had assigned a near-zero probability to the artist topping the charts. Spagnuolo capitalized on the informational asymmetry, placing massive “yes” wagers that D4vd would rank as Google’s absolute most-searched person of the year.
The gamble paid off seamlessly when Google released its official public data, confirming D4vd as the top-trending individual and instantly netting the “AlphaRaccoon” account its $1.2 million windfall. When online sleuths on X and Discord began publicly questioning whether the account had access to Google’s data infrastructure, Spagnuolo reportedly attempted to obscure his digital footprint by changing his username and routing the cryptocurrency through privacy mixers.
Spagnuolo was apprehended by federal agents in New York and subsequently released on a $2.25 million bond. In addition to the criminal indictment, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has launched a parallel civil lawsuit seeking extensive monetary penalties and a permanent trading ban. A Google spokesperson confirmed that the company is fully cooperating with the FBI and has officially placed Spagnuolo on leave pending further disciplinary action.