Google Employee Charged with Using Inside Info for $1M Polymarket Win
Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old information security engineer at Google, has been charged with using inside information to make over $1 million on Polymarket. According to a federal complaint unsealed in New York, Spagnuolo misappropriated confidential data from his employer and used it to place bets on the prediction market platform.
The complaint alleges that Spagnuolo had access to Google's internal data tracking user searches, which he used to correctly predict that D4vd would be the most-searched person in 2025. At the time of the bet, Polymarket assigned a near-zero probability to this outcome.
After Google publicly announced its Year in Search 2025 results on December 4, 2025, Spagnuolo's account profited $1.2 million on his Google-related bets, federal prosecutors said.