Google techie bet $2.7 million on Polymarket with company secrets, won $1.2 million, then FBI caught him
A Google information security engineer with an illustrious career uncovering digital vulnerabilities for one of the world’s most valuable companies has been charged with federal fraud and money laundering; He was accused of using confidential internal call data to place winning bets in a prediction market and allegedly winning $1.2 million before federal investigators traced the money directly to his name. Wall Street Magazine reported.
Google Engineer Michele Spagnuolo Accused of Using Non-Public Search Data on Polymarket
Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen who lives in Zurich and is known professionally as Miki, is currently facing charges filed by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office for allegedly accessing internal Google data showing which public figures were doing the most searches in 2025 and using the information to bet on the outcome of the company’s annual Trends in Search rankings.
The criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday alleges that Spagnuolo accessed search trend data that Google restricted to “only a limited number of employees” and used it to identify musicians Kendrick Lamar and d4vd as the most searched people at the time. Court records indicate both artists were ranked in the top five in the latest Search of the Year results.
Google placed Spagnuolo on administrative leave and said it was cooperating with the investigation. Spagnuolo did not respond to requests for comment.
Essential Puzzle: Why Risk a Career That’s Worth More?
Perhaps the detail that invites most scrutiny in this case is the apparent mismatch between Spagnuolo’s claimed gain and what he risks losing. The indictment provides no explanation as to why someone of his professional stature would take such a gamble for a relatively modest amount by high-end tech compensation standards.
Google employees his seniority typically receive compensation packages in which stock grants constitute a significant and growing share of total earnings. When Spagnuolo joined Google in 2014, shares of parent company Alphabet were trading below $30. Those shares have since surpassed $380; This means that equity capital accumulated at this level over a ten-year run could represent a significant multiple of Polymarket’s claimed earnings.
Matt Schulman, CEO and founder of Pave, an AI platform for compensation data, said the upper end of the salary range for employees in similar roles at large public tech companies is about $1.24 million per year, mostly in equity.
“That makes the risk of anything that could jeopardize their employment extremely high,” Schulman said.
A Decade of Awards and Conference Invitations Before the Accusations
The allegations stand in sharp contrast to the professional records that Spagnuolo has charted in considerable detail on his personal website and blog, tracing his education, career milestones, research contributions and speaking engagements over more than a decade of work in web security.
Google recruiters first approached him in 2011, when he was preparing for a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His master’s thesis focused on developing a forensic tool that can identify real-world users behind bitcoin transactions; This was technically challenging research that was well ahead of mainstream interest in cryptocurrency traceability.
His first official meeting with Google took place in 2013, while he was completing his second master’s degree, this time in computer engineering, at Politecnico di Milano, Italy’s largest technical university. A Google security engineer in Zurich initiated the communication.
“The interview was purely technical and straight to the point,” Spagnuolo wrote on his blog. “He asked me a few technical questions about security from the beginning, and I really appreciated that.”
With about ten minutes left, he was asked to write code that implemented a well-known security tool from scratch. Spagnuolo wrote that the interviewer focused on how he approached the problem rather than the finished code, which he described as “a very good thing.”
He wrote that he was also courted by Facebook during the same period, but that this experience left him dissatisfied, and that he felt that the interviewer gave excessive emphasis to the written code rather than the logical process behind the written codes.
Kendrick Lamar, d4vd and 25 Bets Made in Three Months
Google hired Spagnuolo in 2014, and he rose steadily within the company over the following decade. He has received professional awards, served as an expert witness in legal proceedings, and is known in web security circles for identifying an exploitation technique during white hat work aimed at detecting system vulnerabilities. He presented these findings at security conferences in Malaysia, Vietnam and Amsterdam.
Prosecutors allege Spagnuolo placed approximately $2.7 million on 25 bets at Polymarket between October and December of last year, all tied to Google Search Results of the Year. 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.
His alleged winnings from these bets were $1.2 million.
How a Single Careless Retreat Left the FBI Back in Its Name
When Spagnuolo moved to withdraw Polymarket gains in December, he took multiple steps to hide the digital currency’s trail, including routing funds through a cryptocurrency transfer service that offered enhanced privacy protections, according to the U.S. Department of Justice criminal complaint.
The concealment effort failed due to an earlier and less carefully executed retreat. He transferred nearly $150,000 from Polymarket to a cryptocurrency exchange service in November. Shortly thereafter, the same amount was transferred from that service to a payment processor, where it ended up in an account registered in Spagnuolo’s name and opened using an Italian government ID document. This paper trail gave federal investigators the link they needed to link the funds directly to him.
