Google employee charged with $1.2M insider trading on Polymarket using confidential search data

Federal prosecutors charged Google employee Michele Spagnuolo with fraud for allegedly using confidential internal search data to place $1.2 million in bets on the prediction market Polymarket. TechCrunch reported the charges, filed in the Southern District of New York, accuse Spagnuolo of correctly betting that singer d4vd would be Google's most searched person in 2025 using information from his role as a staff information security engineer. Google confirmed to TechCrunch that Spagnuolo accessed the marketing material through an internal tool available to all employees, framing it as misuse rather than restricted access. This marks the first U.S. insider trading case where a prediction market platform cooperated with prosecutors, according to TechCrunch.