Weeks after a US Army special forces member faced insider trading charges on prediction markets, a Google employee has become the latest to be indicted over alleged misuse of non-public information.
Michele Spagnuolo, allegedly trading under the Polymarket account “AlphaRaccoon”, is facing multiple charges in Manhattan stemming from a scheme to exploit confidential Google data.
Prosecutors allege Spagnuolo accessed an internal Google software tool providing real-time data on its “Year in Search” rankings to place profitable trades on prediction markets.
Over a three-month period through December 2024, Spagnuolo allegedly executed at least 25 trades totalling $2.75 million on Google-related search result markets.
The 36-year-old allegedly generated an illegal profit of at least $1.2 million, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
He faces charges of commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, reinforcing regulatory scrutiny of prediction market platforms that has intensified throughout 2026.
“Today’s charges reinforce a decades-old message: corporate insiders cannot use confidential business information to turn a profit in our markets,” said US Attorney Jay Clayton.
“Insider trading compromises the integrity of our markets, and the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted,” Clayton added in his statement.
In a separate and historic development, Kalshi became the first company in US history to receive regulatory approval for listing crypto perpetual futures on a prediction market platform.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued an Order for Approval for the listing of the BTCPERP Contract, a perpetual futures product referencing Bitcoin’s spot price.
CFTC Chair Michael Selig described the decision as charting a path for “one of the most liquid segments of the crypto asset markets to exist within the US regulatory framework.”
Perpetual futures, commonly known as “perps”, allow traders to speculate on asset prices such as Bitcoin or Ethereum without owning the underlying asset and without an expiration date.
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour described the approval as the company’s next major chapter, stating the firm seeks to ensure “every important question about the world should have a market.”
“If a prediction market is a photograph of what the world thinks right now, a perpetual is a film — continuously updated, never ending, always present,” Mansour wrote in a statement.
On Kalshi, more than three dozen Google-related event contracts were listed, including a market on the most-searched person of the year with approximately $184,000 in trading volume.
Donald Trump led that market at 17%, ahead of Bad Bunny at 16% and Elon Musk at 10%, reflecting the platform’s growing breadth of cultural and political event contracts.
Elsewhere on Kalshi, the San Antonio Spurs saw their NBA championship odds spike to 27% following a commanding 118-97 victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals.
Victor Wembanyama led the Spurs with 28 points and 10 rebounds, his ninth 20-10 game of the playoffs, the most by any player since Nikola Jokic recorded 13 in 2023.
The New York Knicks, returning to the Finals for the first time in 27 years, improved to 33% title odds following the Thunder’s defeat, rising 11 percentage points from the previous day.
The Thunder’s championship probability fell to 43% after the loss, with a decisive Game 7 scheduled for Saturday night to determine who meets the Knicks in the Finals.
