A Google employee was arrested for allegedly using his access to company information to successfully place lucrative bets on the prediction platform Polymarket.
The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said it had charged Michele Spagnuolo, a Google engineer, with breaking insider trading laws because of several bets he placed through the platform.
Although Spagnuolo is an Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, he was arrested on Wednesday and brought before a federal judge in New York.
Spagnuolo allegedly used information he had early access to through his work at Google, which is based in the US, to make bets that saw him rack up $1.2m (£894,330) in winnings.
A spokeswoman for Google said the company was “working with law enforcement on their investigation” and that the employee had been placed on leave.
The internal 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,” she added.
A spokesman for Polymarket said the platform “worked closely” with authorities on the investigation.
“Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints,” the spokesman added.
Blockchain is a sort of digital record applied to cryptocurrency, which is the only currency Polymarket accepts.
The US Attorney’s office worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) on Spagnuolo’s arrest. He has been released on a $2.25m bond, according to ABC News.
Although Spagnuolo allegedly traded under the account name AlphaRaccoon on Polymarket and his bets were made with cryptocurrency from several accounts, the FBI said it linked his accounts by finding one he had opened with an Italian identification card.
Spagnuolo did not respond to an email seeking comment.
According to online profiles, he worked for Google for more than 12 years as an engineer focused on information security.
He started using Polymarket in 2024, and between October and December of last year, the US Attorney’s office said Spagnuolo placed $2.7m in bets related to Google.
By using internal information, he was able to make more than $1m in profits from those bets, it said.
The court papers said Spagnuolo’s most lucrative alleged Polymarket wins were correctly predicting who would and would not be the most searched for person on Google in 2025.
He allegedly placed bets against names, like Bianca Censori and President Donald Trump, and chose the singer D4vd as taking the top spot when the betting platform had odds of that result being near zero.
The court papers said when Spagnuolo placed that bet in November, he knew that D4vd had become Google’s most-searched person because he had access to information the search giant had collected before it was released to the public.
D4vd, a musician, is currently in jail for allegedly murdering a teenage girl.
By BBC News
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