Tech Executive Wins $1.2 Million on Betting Platform, Faces FBI Scrutiny Over Alleged Insider Trading

Google Engineer Charged with Federal Fraud and Money Laundering

Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen and information security engineer at Google, has been charged with federal fraud and money laundering by the Manhattan US attorney's office. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Spagnuolo allegedly exploited confidential internal search data to place winning bets on a prediction market and earn an estimated $1.2 million.

Spagnuolo, known professionally as Miki, is accused of accessing internal Google data showing which public figures were generating the most searches in 2025 and using that information to place bets on the outcome of the company's annual Year in Search rankings. The criminal complaint, unsealed on Wednesday, alleges that Spagnuolo accessed search trend data that Google restricts to "only a limited number of employees" and used it to identify musicians Kendrick Lamar and d4vd as the most-searched individuals at the time. Court records state that both artists finished in the top five of the final Year in Search results.

Google has placed Spagnuolo on administrative leave and is cooperating with the investigation. Spagnuolo did not respond to requests for comment.

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The allegations sit in sharp contrast to a professional record that Spagnuolo has charted in considerable detail on his personal website and blog. Spagnuolo has a decade of experience in web security, with a master's thesis focused on developing a forensics tool capable of identifying real-world users behind bitcoin transactions.

According to Matt Schulman, chief executive and founder of Pave, an AI platform for compensation data, the upper end of the salary range for employees in comparable roles at large public technology companies sits at approximately $1.24 million a year, the majority of which is equity. "That makes the stakes of anything that could jeopardize their employment extremely high," Schulman said.

Prosecutors allege that between October and December of last year, Spagnuolo placed approximately $2.7 million across 25 bets on Polymarket, all tied to the Google Year in Search results. The search data he allegedly accessed pointed to Kendrick Lamar and d4vd as the dominant names at the time. Both ultimately placed in the top five of the final published results.

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Spagnuolo's alleged winnings from those bets amounted to $1.2 million. However, his attempt to obscure the digital money trail ultimately led to his downfall. When he moved to withdraw his Polymarket winnings in December, he took multiple steps to conceal the funds, but an earlier, less carefully handled withdrawal in November uncovered his identity.

In November, Spagnuolo transferred nearly $150,000 from Polymarket to a cryptocurrency swapping service. Shortly after, an identical sum moved from that service to a payment processor, where it arrived in an account registered in Spagnuolo's name and opened using his Italian government identification document. That paper trail gave federal investigators the link they needed to connect the funds directly to him.