A Google engineer made $1.2 million from trades based on confidential information, the DOJ said.
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The DOJ said a Google engineer used confidential company information to mint over $1 million in profit on Polymarket.A New York district attorney, Jay Clayton, said in a Wednesday news release that Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo used the tech giant's confidential business information to make "more than $1.2 million in trading profits on Polymarket."Spagnuolo, who the DOJ identified as a 36-year-old Italian citizen living in Switzerland, created a Polymarket account in 2024 under the username "AlphaRaccoon." Between October and December last year, he bet about $2,754,000 on markets related to Google's internal information.James C. Barnacle, Jr., an FBI assistant director, said in the release that Spagnuolo had access to "confidential trends" within Google, which he may have abused for profit.Spagnuolo is accused of violating the Commodity Exchange Act, wire fraud, and money laundering. The charges carry a combined maximum sentence of 50 years in prison."Today's charges reinforce a decades-old message: corporate insiders cannot use confidential business information to turn a profit in our markets," Clayton said.According to a LinkedIn account tied to his name, Spagnuolo was a staff information security engineer and was involved in creating the infrastructure to deploy AI agents within Alphabet.
