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Michele Spagnuolo, a software engineer at Google $GOOGL -0.56%, was charged Wednesday with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering for allegedly using confidential company data to generate approximately $1.2 million in profits on the prediction market platform Polymarket.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York allege that Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen residing in Switzerland, accessed an internal Google software tool — marked "Google Confidential" in red text — to obtain nonpublic data about Google's 2025 Year in Search results. He then used that information to place trades on Polymarket between October and December 2025, risking roughly $2.7 million across at least 23 contracts tied to the annual search rankings. He used the account name "AlphaRaccoon" on the platform.
The charges carry a combined maximum sentence of 50 years in prison. Spagnuolo appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn on Wednesday and was released on a $2.25 million bond. His attorney, Mike Ferrara, declined to comment on the charges, according to Bloomberg.
Among the bets prosecutors detailed, Spagnuolo placed a wager that singer D4vd would rank as Google's most-searched person of 2025 — a contract that Polymarket had assigned a near-zero probability at the time. When Google publicly announced its Year in Search results on December 4, 2025, confirming D4vd as the top-searched person, Spagnuolo's account collected roughly $1.2 million in profits.
