D4vd Bet Put Google Engineer Michele Spagnuolo Under Federal Scrutiny
Google engineer Michele Spagnuolo was arrested on Wednesday after federal prosecutors said he used internal Google information to make more than $1 million in profits on Polymarket bets, including a wager tied to d4vd. He was brought before a federal judge in New York and released on a $2.25m bond.
The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged him with breaking insider trading laws over several bets on the cryptocurrency-based prediction market. The case centers on how a Google employee allegedly turned early access to company data into $1.2m in winnings, a sharp escalation from an internal policy issue to a federal criminal matter.
Google security role and leave
According to online profiles, Spagnuolo worked at Google for more than 12 years as an engineer focused on information security. Google said it was working with law enforcement on their investigation and said the employee had been placed on leave.
Google also said he had been using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies. That puts the company in the position of policing conduct that allegedly drew on information collected before it was released to the public.
$2.7m in Google-linked bets
Between October and December of last year, Spagnuolo placed $2.7m in bets related to Google, according to the court papers. Prosecutors said he made more than $1m in profits from those wagers by using internal information, and the filings describe his most lucrative wins as correctly predicting who would and would not be the most searched for person on Google in 2025.
In November, he allegedly chose the singer D4vd as taking the top spot even though the betting platform had odds near zero for that result. The court papers said he knew D4vd had become Google’s most-searched person because he had access to information Google had collected before it was released to the public.
Polymarket and the FBI
Polymarket said it worked closely with authorities on the investigation and added, Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints. The FBI worked with the US Attorney’s office on Spagnuolo’s arrest, and the company’s role in the case shows how betting activity on blockchain rails can still leave a paper trail when investigators move through the accounts.
Spagnuolo started using Polymarket in 2024, then built up wagers tied to Google search outcomes and other company-related outcomes. For Google, the immediate issue is no longer just the alleged misuse of internal information; it is a criminal case, a suspended employee, and a bond set at $2.25m.
