A Google information security engineer who built a celebrated career exposing digital vulnerabilities for one of the world's most valuable companies has been charged with federal fraud and money laundering, accused of exploiting confidential internal search data to place winning bets on a prediction market and earn an alleged $1.2 million before federal investigators traced the money directly back to his name, Wall Street Journal reported .
Google Engineer Michele Spagnuolo Charged With Using Nonpublic Search Data on Polymarket
Michele Spagnuolo, 36, an Italian citizen who lives in Zurich and is known professionally as Miki, now faces charges filed by the Manhattan US attorney's office alleging that he accessed internal Google data showing which public figures were generating the most searches in 2025 and used that information to place bets on the outcome of the company's annual Year in Search rankings.
The criminal complaint, unsealed on Wednesday, alleges that Spagnuolo accessed search trend data that Google restricts to "only a limited number of employees" and used it to identify musicians Kendrick Lamar and d4vd as the most-searched individuals at the time. Court records state that both artists finished in the top five of the final Year in Search results.
Google placed Spagnuolo on administrative leave and said it is cooperating with the investigation. Spagnuolo did not respond to requests for comment.
The Central Puzzle: Why Risk a Career Worth Multiples More
Perhaps the detail that most invites scrutiny in this case is the apparent mismatch between what Spagnuolo allegedly stood to gain and what he risked losing. The indictment contains no explanation for why someone with his professional standing would take such a gamble for a sum that, by the standards of senior technology compensation, is relatively modest.
Google employees at his seniority typically receive compensation packages in which stock grants form a substantial and growing share of total earnings. When Spagnuolo joined Google in 2014, shares in parent company Alphabet were trading at below $30. Those shares have since surpassed $380, meaning accumulated equity over a decade of employment at that level could represent a significant multiple of his alleged Polymarket winnings.
Matt Schulman, chief executive and founder of Pave, an AI platform for compensation data, said the upper end of the salary range for employees in comparable roles at large public technology companies sits at approximately $1.24 million a year, the majority of which is equity.
"That makes the stakes of anything that could jeopardize their employment extremely high," Schulman said.
A Decade of Awards and Conference Invitations Before the Charges
The allegations sit in sharp contrast to a professional record that Spagnuolo has charted in considerable detail on his personal website and blog, where he traces his education, career milestones, research contributions and speaking engagements across more than a decade of work in web security.
Google's recruiters first approached him in 2011, when he was preparing to pursue a graduate degree in computer science at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His master's thesis focused on developing a forensics tool capable of identifying real-world users behind bitcoin transactions, a technically demanding piece of research that was well ahead of mainstream interest in cryptocurrency traceability.
His first formal interview with Google took place in 2013 while he was completing a second graduate degree, this time in computer engineering, at Politecnico di Milano, the largest technical university in Italy. A Google security engineer based in Zurich initiated contact.
"The interview was completely technical and straight to the point," Spagnuolo wrote on his blog. "He asked me several technical questions about security from the beginning, and I really appreciated that."
With roughly ten minutes remaining, he was asked to write code implementing a well-known security tool from scratch. Spagnuolo wrote that the interviewer appeared less focused on the finished code than on how he approached the problem, which he described as "a very good thing."
He had also been courted by Facebook during the same period but wrote that the experience left him underwhelmed, feeling that the interviewer placed excessive weight on written code rather than the reasoning process behind it.
Kendrick Lamar, d4vd and 25 Bets Placed Over Three Months
Google hired Spagnuolo in 2014, and over the following decade he rose steadily within the company. He received professional awards, served as an expert witness in legal proceedings and became known in web security circles for identifying an exploitation technique during a white-hat exercise aimed at locating system vulnerabilities. He presented those findings at security conferences in Malaysia, Vietnam and Amsterdam.
Prosecutors allege that between October and December of last year, Spagnuolo placed approximately $2.7 million across 25 bets on Polymarket, all tied to the Google Year in Search results. 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 those bets amounted to $1.2 million.
How a Single Careless Withdrawal Led the FBI Back to His Name
When Spagnuolo moved to withdraw his Polymarket winnings in December, he took multiple steps to obscure the digital money trail, including routing funds through a cryptocurrency transfer service offering enhanced privacy protections, according to the US Department of Justice criminal complaint.
The concealment effort came undone because of an earlier, less carefully handled withdrawal. In November, he transferred nearly $150,000 from Polymarket to a cryptocurrency swapping service. Shortly after, an identical sum moved from that service to a payment processor, where it arrived in an account registered in Spagnuolo's name and opened using his Italian government identification document. That paper trail gave federal investigators the link they needed to connect the funds directly to him.
