They sue a Google employee for winning $1.2 million by betting on Polymarket who would be the most searched characters of 2025

The accused is Michele Spagnuolo, an Italian Google engineer, who is accused of using “confidential and valuable non-public information of his employer to make bets related” to the company. This is how it appears in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Southern District Court of New York.

Spagnuolo was an information security engineer and participated in creating the infrastructure necessary to deploy artificial intelligence agents at Alphabet, according to the profile available on LinkedIn.

It is about the second case that reaches the courts of New York, after the complaint against the American soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke for using sensitive information from the army to bet when Nicolás Maduro would be overthrown in Venezuela, just hours before the covert operation that captured him in Caracas.

According to the document, to which he had access ClarionSpagnuolo “had agreed to confidential internal data of high commercial value” of the company, so he knew the results before the rest of the users who bet on the platform. This is how he advanced with a series of bets with perfect timing about last year’s most searched terms.

The US Justice accuses Spagnuolo, 36, who was released on a bail of 2.25 million dollars, of fraud in the raw materials market, money laundering and electronic fraud. According to the Business Insider site, the combination of the charges can lead to up to 50 years in prison.

According to the complaint, Spanish controlled the AlphaRaccoon user. At the end of last year he used his access to internal Google tools, specifically marked as “confidential”, to find out the results of the campaign. “The year in Searches 2025” before its official publication

With this advantage, the engineer sent a total of 2.7 million dollars to his anonymous wallet on the platform to start betting on 25 categories linked to the report.

How to Polymarket It works by betting on binary options, yes or no, The categories were linked to those who did and did not appear in the report.

For example, bet more than 600 thousand dollars that Pope Leo XIV would not be the most wanted person of the year. Also 500 thousand dollars that Trump would not be either, and even that he would not be in the Top 5 of the year.

But the biggest profit was made by betting with a couple of rappers. For example, he bet $403 that American rapper Kendrick Lamar would be the most sought after, when the market gave him only 3%.

However, in late November, just days before the report was released, Lamar lost the top spot to another rapper. It was d4vd, who was in the news for the crime of the minor Celeste Rivas Hernández, whom he stabbed and dismembered before hiding the body in the trunk of his Tesla. The morbidity surrounding the case made it the most searched name of 2025.

Attentive to these movements, Spagnuolo bet $381 that d4vd would be in the Top 5 of the most searched terms and another $5 that it would be the most searched. At that time, the odds were almost zero at Polymarket.

With all those combinations, Spagnuolo withdrew almost 3.9 million dollars, a profit close to 1.2 million. However, on social networks it began to be mentioned that the user AlphaRacoon could be a Google employee. In his history there was a very precise success linked to the exact date of version 3.0 of Google’s AI model, Gemini, with which he pocketed 150 thousand dollars.

When the news began to spread, Spagnuolo decided to delete the user and try to go unnoticed.

However, when he took out the money he did so through several transactions that went through exchange platforms first (swapping services)and then by payment processors, a key point since these platforms revealed to Justice that the account was opened with Spagnuolo’s Italian document.

After the complaint, Polymarket celebrated the arrest on its social networks and boasted of having found the unfaithful employee. “With two arrests in this sector as a result of our criminal complaints, Polymarket has established itself as a leader in the fight against these practices. Blockchain operations are transparent and traceable, and offenders leave traces,” they wrote in X.

The message comes amid growing criticism over the emergence of users who use inside information to earn on the platform, especially in prediction markets linked to military conflicts. Shane Coplan, CEO of the company, was enthusiastic about the emergence of insiders at the beginning of the project.

Google, for its part, announced that it suspended Spagnuolo while the investigation continues. “The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but the use of said confidential information to place bets constitutes a serious violation of our policies,” said Google spokesperson Jaclyn Vázquez, in a statement to the specialized portal The Verge.