Google engineer charged over bets | Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

U.S. prosecutors filed insider trading charges this week against a Google software engineer accused of using confidential company information to profit on Polymarket. The defendant is Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian citizen living in Switzerland who has worked for Google since 2014 and traded under the name AlphaRaccoon. Authorities say he used Google's 2025 Year in Search data before its public release to bet on the year's most searched people, from October through December last year, including Kendrick Lamar and, later, D4vd as internal data showed rising popularity. The complaint notes profits realized after December 4.