Google Engineer Accused Of Making $1.2M From Morbid Polymarket Bets Linked To d4vd

Michele Spagnuolo faced fraud charges after allegedly using Google search data to rig Polymarket bets and win $1.2 million.

Michele Spagnuolo had a cheat code most gamblers can only dream about: he worked at Google and knew exactly who the internet was searching for before the rest of the world found out – d4vd.

Federal prosecutors unsealed charges against the 36-year-old Italian security engineer on Wednesday, accusing him of using confidential company data to place a series of rigged bets on Polymarket, a cryptocurrency prediction market, and walking away with $1.2 million in the process.

The scheme leaned heavily on one of Hip-Hop’s most disturbing stories of the past year. Spagnuolo allegedly accessed an internal Google tool that showed d4vd‘s name surging across search traffic, a spike directly tied to the singer’s arrest and murder charge in the death of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez.

At the time Spagnuolo placed his bet, Polymarket had assigned a near-zero probability that d4vd would finish as the most-searched person of the year, but the engineer already knew what the data said, according to the federal complaint.

That single bet, built on inside knowledge of a murder case that shook the music world, became the anchor of a fraud operation the feds say stretched from October to December 2025.

Operating under the username “AlphaRaccoon,” Spagnuolo placed yes-or-no wagers on at least 23 separate Year in Search contracts, hitting correctly on nearly all of them.

He risked over $2.7 million total across those bets, and when Google publicly dropped its Year in Search results on December 4, 2025, his account collected.

The winnings were then routed through cryptocurrency-swapping services to obscure the trail, eventually landing in an account opened with Spagnuolo’s Italian government ID. When online observers started flagging AlphaRaccoon’s suspiciously perfect record in December, he quietly changed his handle.

Google confirmed Spagnuolo has been placed on leave and said the tool he used was technically available to all employees, but that leveraging confidential data for personal profit is a serious policy violation.

Prosecutors charged him with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a parallel civil lawsuit seeking disgorgement of his profits and a permanent trading ban. He appeared in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday without entering a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond.

Prosecutors investigating d4vd’s alleged murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez have been building a capital case against the singer throughout 2026, with child pornography evidence surfacing and a death penalty decision still pending, per NBC News.

Spagnuolo’s case is the second Polymarket insider trading prosecution out of the Southern District of New York this year, following charges against a U.S. Special Forces soldier who allegedly made $400,000 betting on the military capture of Nicolas Maduro.

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