A Google software engineer living in Switzerland turned his access to one of the world’s most valuable data streams — the company’s internal search rankings — into a personal trading operation, federal prosecutors in New York charged Wednesday, unsealing a complaint that named him as the architect of a scheme netting $1.2 million in prediction market profits.
Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian citizen, allegedly placed bets on Polymarket tied to Google’s annual most-searched list while he knew in advance which names were rising toward the top. The U.S. Justice Department says he did it more than once, and that the margin he carried into each wager wasn’t luck — it was corporate intelligence converted into cash.
The most striking example involves a musician few outside younger streaming audiences would have predicted as Google’s most-searched figure of the year.
D4vd — an indie pop artist who had built a modest following before his arrest on suspicion of murdering a teenage girl vaulted him to global search volume — ended up topping Google’s annual rankings when the company released its year-end data on December 4. Spagnuolo allegedly knew that was coming. Court documents show he placed his bet on November 27, a full week before the list went public. At the time, Polymarket’s odds assigned D4vd a near-zero probability of landing at number one. The payout was enormous precisely because the market had no idea what Spagnuolo already did.
He operated under the account name “AlphaRaccoon.”
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It wasn’t a one-time move. Prosecutors say Spagnuolo ran a similar play in October, wagering that rapper Kendrick Lamar would top the most-searched list at a moment when Google’s internal data showed Lamar tracking toward that outcome. That bet, too, was placed with information no one outside the company’s walls was supposed to carry into a trading decision.
Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, framed the charges in language that signals prosecutors intend to treat prediction markets with the same seriousness as Wall Street. Corporate insiders who route confidential business intelligence into these platforms will be pursued, Clayton said, describing the conduct as greed-driven and corrosive to market integrity.
Google confirmed Spagnuolo has been placed on administrative leave. In a statement, the company said it is cooperating with law enforcement and characterized the use of confidential internal information to place bets as a serious policy violation.
Polymarket, for its part, claimed credit for enabling the case, saying it assisted law enforcement in investigating Spagnuolo’s account activity. The platform noted it is the only prediction market whose cooperation with U.S. authorities has produced an insider trading charge.
The case lands in Manhattan federal court at a moment when prediction markets — long treated as niche forecasting tools — are drawing the attention of federal prosecutors who see in their structure the same vulnerabilities that have long existed in securities trading. Access to non-public information creates asymmetry. Asymmetry, when exploited for profit, is insider trading. The underlying asset — whether a stock price or a search ranking — is becoming less relevant to how prosecutors build their cases.
This is the second such charge linked to Polymarket in two months. In April, federal prosecutors in a separate case charged a U.S. Army soldier with using classified military intelligence to place bets on whether Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro would be captured. That case involved the same platform, the same legal theory, and a defendant with access to information that markets had no way to price.
Attorneys for Spagnuolo could not be immediately identified.
What both cases share is the same essential act: someone with a hand inside a closed room placed bets in a public market as if the door were still shut behind them. Google’s search data was never meant to leave the building before December 4. For the man behind the AlphaRaccoon account, it did — and a criminal complaint is now the record of what he did with it.