Edgar Cervantes/Android Authority
TL;DR
- Federal prosecutors charged a Google engineer with insider trading after he allegedly won more than $1.2 million on Polymarket by using confidential search trends data.
- Authorities say the employee secretly accessed non-public Google “Year in Search” data and placed highly accurate bets under the alias “Alpharecoon.”
- Investigators have flagged an almost impossible prediction in which artist D4vd will become Google’s most searched person in 2025.
As a Google software engineer, treating confidential company data as your personal cheat code is a guaranteed path to federal prosecution.
Federal prosecutors have charged Michele Spagnuolo with insider trading for allegedly using confidential Google search data to make more than $1.2 million on Polymarket. ABC News Report. According to a criminal complaint filed in New York, a 36-year-old Google employee and Italian citizen living in Switzerland allegedly gained access to non-public Google information and used it to place highly accurate bets under the alias “Alpharecon.” Prosecutors said the bet was linked to Google search trends and “Search of the Year” rankings that had not yet been made public.
Authorities say Spagnuolo placed bets worth about $2.75 million and turned those trades into profits of about $1.2 million. One of the biggest red flags was a strangely accurate prediction that indie artist D4VD would be the most searched person on Google in 2025, which prosecutors say could not have been reasonably predicted using public information alone.
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Investigators claim Spagnuolo also placed correct bets on which celebrities and public figures would make Google’s annual trending search rankings and which would not. The complaint says they exploited internal Google systems to gain unfair advantages before the data was made public.
The US Justice Department charged him with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. If convicted on all counts, he faces decades in prison. Law enforcement arrested him in New York, although he has reportedly been released on $2.25 million bond.
According to the report, Google said the employee has been placed on leave and is cooperating with law enforcement.
Prediction markets operate mostly in legal gray areas. Instead of stock trading, users bet on the outcomes of politics, world events, sports or Internet trends. Proponents see them as predictive tools. Critics view them as betting sites with weak safeguards against insider activity.
This is not the first time that Polymarket is on the hot seat. Earlier this year, a number of suspiciously timed bets linked to geopolitical events raised concerns about insider trading, leading lawmakers to call for tighter oversight. Some regulators and legal scholars say the contracts create new opportunities for people with privileged information to quietly make profits before the public gets hold of it.
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