A Google software engineer has been accused of using inside information to make more than $1 million on a prediction market. The charges were announced Wednesday in an unsealed criminal complaint in New York that alleges Michele Spagnuolo “misappropriated confidential and valuable nonpublic information from his employer and used that information to place a series of Google-related bets on Polymarket.” The complaint accuses Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen living in Switzerland, of making a series of bets from October 2025 to December 2025 tied to Google’s most-searched people of 2025. Specifically, prosecutors say he bet that Donald Trump, Pope Leo XIV, and Kanye West’s wife Bianca Censori would each not be the most searched person on Google in 2025. He also bet that the artist D4vd would land in the top five and take the number one spot. Spagnuolo ended up profiting roughly $1.2 million from these bets, but prosecutors say he had an unfair advantage.
“Unlike the counterparties to his trades, Spagnuolo knew the outcome of these wagers before the trading public did because he had accessed Google’s confidential, commercially valuable internal data,” the complaint alleges. Spagnuolo is now charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The charges carry maximum sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years in prison.
