A Google information security engineer accused of using inside information to place Polymarket bets has been charged after allegedly profiting from wagers tied to Google search results. Prosecutors say Michele Spagnuolo made more than $1 million by betting on what users were searching for, using confidential Google data he allegedly had access to through his job. Authorities allege Spagnuolo “misappropriated confidential and valuable nonpublic information” from his employer and used it to place Google-related bets on the prediction market platform. The complaint says he knew the outcomes before the public because he accessed Google’s internal information tracking searches. One bet allegedly involved Google’s most-searched person in 2025. Prosecutors say Polymarket assigned a near-zero probability to D4vd being “the #1 searched person on Google this year,” but Spagnuolo placed the wager using an account under the name AlphaRaccoon. After Google publicly released its Year in Search 2025 results on Dec. 4, 2025, his AlphaRaccoon account profited $1.2 million on the Google Year in Search 2025-related bets. Prosecutors also allege that once he won, Spagnuolo took steps to conceal the source and ownership of the proceeds. Spagnuolo was arrested in New York and appeared briefly before a federal magistrate judge. He did not enter a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond, secured by $1 million cash, with $50,000 due to be posted Wednesday. A Google spokesperson said the employee accessed marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but that using confidential information to place bets was a serious breach of company policies, and the employee has been placed on leave.