Google Engineer Charged with Insider Trading: Betting on d4vd's Infamy

Last fall, alt-pop singer d4vd became the subject of intense media attention when a body was discovered in his Tesla, later identified as 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. The situation escalated when d4vd was arrested and charged with her murder. The internet quickly drew connections between the 20-year-old artist, David Anthony Burke, and Hernandez.

Now, NBC reports that Michele Spagnulo, a Google software engineer, faces insider trading charges. He allegedly used confidential company information to amass over $1.2 million on Polymarket, wagering that d4vd would become Google's most-searched person of 2025.

Spagnulo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen residing in Switzerland, is charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. He purportedly exploited internal Google search data, tracking user searches, to place bets from October to December under the pseudonym AlphaRacoon. At the time, the prediction market assigned a near-zero probability to d4vd becoming Google's top search.

The complaint states that after winning, Spagnulo took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that Spagnulo has been placed on leave, stating, "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."

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