Google worker faces charges over $1.2M in Polymarket trades
Tech Google worker faces charges over $1.2M in Polymarket trades The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged a Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) employee with insider trading after uncovering a scheme to misappropriate confidential company information and use it to place a series of profitable trades on the prediction market platform Polymarket. On Wednesday, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, and Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), James C. Barnacle, Jr., announced the unsealing of a complaint charging Michele Spagnuolo, a software engineer at Google, with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The DOJ alleges that Spagnuolo, also known by his Polymarket profile “AlphaRaccoon,” abused his access to Googles internal data systems to obtain nonpublic data that he then used to place trades in various markets on the prediction platform. In total, from October 15, 2025, through to December 4, 2025, Spagnuolo allegedly used his AlphaRaccoon account to risk approximately $2,754,092 on markets related to Google‘s internal information. After the information became public and the markets resolved, Spagnuolo’s AlphaRaccoon account profited approximately $1.2 million. “Michele Spagnuolo allegedly abused his elevated access to confidential trends to place bets with nonpublic