Google engineer made $1.2M by placing bets on Polymarket using confidential info, prosecutors allege
A Google engineer is accused of making over $1.2 million by using confidential company information to place bets on Polymarket. Michele Spagnulo allegedly wagered on the singer D4vd being Google's most-searched person of the year in 2025, leveraging insider data. The case highlights ongoing concerns about insider trading in prediction markets and has led to significant legal actions.
- ▪Michele Spagnulo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen, is charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.
- ▪Prosecutors allege he used internal Google search data to place bets from October to December 2025.
- ▪Spagnulo earned over $1.2 million by betting on D4vd, who was assigned a near-zero probability of being the top-searched person.
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| Original publisher | NBC News — Top |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-engineer-polymarket-bets-confidential-information-rcna347249 |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 02:43:26 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T02:48:07.666Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T02:48:07.666Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NYKHDNaTZ-vc · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
U.S. newsGoogle engineer made $1.2M by placing bets on Polymarket using confidential info, prosecutors allegeMichele Spagnulo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen living in Switzerland, used insider information to bet singer D4vd would be Google’s most-searched person of the year in 2025, according to prosecutors.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00A general exterior view of Google's headquarters in London. A Google engineer is accused in the U.S. of using insider information to make more than $1 million off bets placed on Polymarket.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NBC News — Top.
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