Google employee charged with fraud after winning $1.2m on Polymarket

A Google employee was charged with fraud wednesday after allegedly winning $1.2m betting on Google trends at gambling site Polymarket. Michele Spagnulo, 36, used insider info and a pseudonym, prosecutors say, to run the table.

Arrested in New York, he faces counts of commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, according to a federal criminal complaint [PDF, justice.gov].

ABC News' Aaron Katersky and Katherine Faulders report that he has posted a $2.25m bond.

For Michele Spagnuolo, these were sure bets because, as a Google information security engineer, he had access to company data that tracked user searches, according to the complaint, which said Spagnuolo "misappropriated confidential and valuable nonpublic information from his employer and used that information to place a series of Google-related bets on Polymarket, a prediction market platform."

Under his account, AlphaRaccoon, the software engineer allegedly laid unlikely bets on esoteric outcomes. Notably, he allegedly knew the most-searched person in 2025, the singer D4vd, to whom Polymarket assigned a "near-zero probability" at the time of the bet. Spagnulo had access to Google's internal data systems revealing this, according to the complaint.

After scoring big, the AlphaRaccoon account took steps to conceal its operator, but investigators followed "a total of 16 transfers" between cryptocurrency wallets and swapping services. A payment processor ultimately exposed Spagnolo's identity, according to the complaint.

Miki.it is his website.

I currently lead the Agent & Web Observability area in the Information Security team, building infrastructure to maintain an inventory of AI agents across Alphabet and making the security properties of terabytes of daily web traffic queryable. This enables large-scale, data-driven security remediations and supports the deployment of modern web security features. I co-authored 'strict-dynamic' in the CSP3 W3 specification, which now protects more than a third of the Internet's HTML traffic against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Internally, I built Security Signals, a comprehensive system providing security measurability across thousands of Google's web services handling traffic from billions of users, and I'm currently defining a common methodology for holistic product security measurability.

All that security work, and he apparently forgot he'd uploaded a scan of his ID card to the payment processor.

Yes, he has a TED talk, "How blockchain can revolutionize the web."

Here's the Department of Justice's press release: Google Employee Charged With Insider Trading.