Google engineer arrested for crypto market betting fraud

A Google security engineer has been arrested and charged with fraud for allegedly using confidential company data to place profitable bets on a cryptocurrency-based prediction market. Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen, was taken into custody in New York on Wednesday and later released on a $2.25 million bond.

Federal prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed a criminal complaint alleging Spagnuolo committed commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. The complaint states he used his access to Google's internal search trend data to place wagers on Polymarket, a platform where users bet on future events. Officials allege he personally profited more than $1.2 million.

According to the complaint, Spagnuolo, who has worked at Google since 2014, used an internal company tool to see which search terms were trending. He then allegedly used that non-public information to place bets from approximately October to December 2025 under the username "AlphaRaccoon." In one instance, he correctly wagered that the singer known as D4vd would be Google's most-searched person of 2025, a prediction that had been assigned a...