A Google engineer is facing federal charges after allegedly using his employer’s confidential data to pocket $1.2 million on Polymarket

A software engineer with more than a decade of experience at Google allegedly used internal information to pocket $1.2 million on the prediction market Polymarket.

Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer who went by the username “AlphaRaccoon” online, allegedly disregarded red text at the top of an internal tool that read “Google Confidential,” and accessed data about the most-searched celebrities to help inform several bets he made on Google’s 2025 Year in Search, a marketing campaign showing the top searches from last year, according to the complaint, which was filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Spagnuolo, who worked at Google for 12 years, allegedly used a crypto wallet to put up $2.7 million of his own money across dozens of bets to net a nine-figure payday. Using the internal Google data as a reference, Spagnuolo, among other bets, wagered $937,688 that Bianca Censori, Kanye West’s wife, would not be the No. 1 person searched last year even as the average implied probability was about 85%. 

He repeated the process several times, betting hundreds of thousands of dollars that well-known figures such as Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump would not be the top searched person, even when the probability was shown as high on Polymarket. He also bet on musical artist d4vd ...