Google Engineer Charged With Insider Trading After Making $1.2M On D4vd Polymarket Bet

Last fall, alt-pop singer d4vd made lots of headlines when a dead body later identified as 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez was found in his Tesla. It wasn't until last month that he was arrested and charged with murder, but at the time the story took the internet by storm as users were connecting the dots between 20-year-old David Anthony Burke and Hernandez. Now, NBC reports that a Google software engineer has been charged with insider trading after using confidential company information to make over $1.2 million on Polymarket, wagering that d4vd would be Google's most-searched person of 2025.

Michele Spagnulo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen living in Switzerland, has been charged with one count each of commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. He allegedly utilized internal Google search data that tracked user searches to place a series of bets from October to December under the username AlphaRacoon. At the time, the prediction market "assigned a near-zero probability" to the chances of d4vd being the top-searched person on Google.

"Once he won, Spagnulo then took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceed," the complaint says.

A spokesperson for Google clarified that Spagnulo has since been placed on leave, saying, "The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies."