AlphaRaccoon: The Google Engineer Who Rigged Polymarket for $1.2M
A Google engineer saw GOOGLE CONFIDENTIAL in red text. He clicked through it anyway. Then bet $2.75 million using what he found inside.
Polymarket is a betting site. You pick an outcome, put money on it, and if you are right, you collect. Simple. Clean. Supposedly fair.
Michele Spagnuolo found a way to make it less fair.
He was a staff information security engineer at Google. Twelve years at the company. And he had access to an internal tool that tracked which celebrities people were googling most, in real time, throughout the year. The data was live. The data was accurate. And the tool had a label at the top, in red text: "Google Confidential."
He clicked through it anyway.
In 2024, Spagnuolo opened a Polymarket account under the name "AlphaRaccoon." Between October 15 and December 4, 2025, he placed $2,754,092 in bets. Every single one was tied to Google's Year in Search - the annual campaign where Google reveals the most-searched celebrities of the year. The same campaign Spagnuolo had inside data for.
He was not guessing. He had the answers in front of him.
The bets show how confident he was. He wagered nearly $1 million that Bianca Censori - Kanye West's wife - would not be the most-Googled person of 2025. He placed over $600,000 against Pope Leo XIV. And he bet that a rapper named D4vd would finish number one - at a time when Polymarket was pricing that outcome at "near-zero probability."
D4vd was number one. He had also been charged with murder during the year. That is why the search volume was what it was. AlphaRaccoon knew. The data told him.
On December 4, 2025, Google officially announced its Year in Search results. AlphaRaccoon collected $1.2 million in profit across 25 winning bets.
Then he deleted the name AlphaRaccoon from his account.
It did not help.
Other Polymarket users had already flagged the AlphaRaccoon account in December for suspicious trading patterns. Someone who consistently bets on near-impossible outcomes and wins, over and over, stands out. The community noticed. Polymarket noticed. And Polymarket handed everything to federal prosecutors.
On May 27, 2026, Spagnuolo was arrested in New York. He was charged with violating the Commodity Exchange Act, wire fraud, and money laundering. Combined maximum sentence if convicted on all counts: 50 years. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a separate civil case the same day.
He appeared before a federal magistrate judge, did not enter a plea, and was released on a $2.25 million bond. He had to post roughly what he made in winnings just to go home.
Google placed him on administrative leave. "The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees," a spokesperson said, "but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies."
Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was direct: "Insider trading compromises the integrity of our markets, and the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted."
Polymarket cooperated fully with the investigation and positioned itself as the good guy. The platform said it is "the only prediction platform to date whose cooperation has led to insider trading charges in the United States."
This is only the second federal criminal case tied to Polymarket. The first involved a U.S. Army soldier who allegedly used classified intelligence about a military operation to make $400,000 betting on whether Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro would be captured.
The case lands in the middle of a political fight. Minnesota became the first US state to ban prediction markets outright. Two U.S. senators proposed the "Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act." Every new prosecution adds weight to that debate.
Spagnuolo is 36. Italian citizen. Lives in Switzerland. He had a prestigious job at one of the most powerful companies on Earth, twelve years of seniority, and access to data generated by hundreds of millions of people every day. He used it to bet on celebrity search rankings.
The tool said Google Confidential. In red text. He clicked through it.
The Aftermath
Spagnuolo was released on a $2.25 million bond after his May 27 arraignment and did not enter a plea. Google placed him on administrative leave and confirmed cooperation with law enforcement. The CFTC filed a parallel civil case. He faces a combined maximum sentence of 50 years if convicted on all three counts. The case is the second federal insider trading prosecution tied to Polymarket, and has intensified the political debate over whether prediction markets should remain legal in the US.
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