Google Employee Charged with Fraud over $1 Million Bet on Alleged Murderer

A Google employee was arrested and charged with fraud after he used inside information from the company to place bets involving alleged murderer D4vd … which won him a fat $1.2 million payout.

A federal criminal complaint unsealed in New York Wednesday claims Michele Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen and Google software engineer, used his access to confidential company data tracking user searches to place several Google-related bets on the prediction platform, Polymarket.

His alleged bets relating to singer D4vd show Spagnuolo used his “AlphaRaccoon” Polymarket account to vote “yes” for D4vd being ranked in “Google’s Top 5 Most Searched People of 2025” as well as in the “Will d4vd be the #1 searched person on Google this year” poll.

Polymarket’s prediction mechanism had “assigned a near-zero probability” for the latter option … but by then, the government says Google’s internal Year in Search data reflected that D4vd had replaced Kendrick Lamar as Google’s most searched person for 2025. Spagnuolo saw this information and used it to wager less than $1,000, but walked away with $1.2 million on his Google Year in Search 2025-related bets, per federal prosecutors.

They say Spagnuolo then “took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds.”

Spagnuolo was arrested on Wednesday and charged with money laundering, commodities fraud, and wire fraud. He appeared before a federal magistrate judge, during which he did not enter a plea. He was released on a $2.25 million bond.