The accused murderer D4VD has not left the headlines for almost a year. The rapper was allegedly responsible for the death of Celeste Rivas Hernandez, but while the case was still ongoing, federal prosecutors believe that a Google employee was using insider information to place bets on him through Polymarket.
TMZ reports that an Italian Google software engineer, Michele Spagnuolo, is being accused of using his access to confidential company data to track user searches so he could place Google-related bets on Polymarket. Spagnuolo’s alleged wagers included betting “yes” on whether the suspected murderer would appear in Google’s “Top 5 Most Searched People of 2025.”
Spagnuolo allegedly saw through internal records that D4VD had replaced Kendrick Lamar as the most searched person on Google in 2025, partly due to his dramatic arrest. He is accused of wagering less than $1,000 and turning it into $1.2 million. Federal prosecutors say Spagnuolo “took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information by attempting to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds.”
Reportedly, Spagnuolo is now facing charges of money laundering, wire fraud, and commodities fraud. He appeared before a federal magistrate judge in New York on May 27 but has not yet entered a plea. Still, he was released the same day on a $2.25 million bond.
Polymarket now sits at the center of nearly every facet of culture. Which was always the goal when it started out — but perhaps not exactly in the way the company had hoped. First and foremost, its branding as a “predictive market” instead of simply gambling has not really worked. The majority of people still view it as betting.
Secondly, whenever the platform gets mentioned in the news, it is usually in a negative context. Not necessarily because of the known downsides of gambling addiction, but rather because Polymarket has increasingly become viewed as a hub for insider trading. Whether people are predicting what will happen next in the Iran conflict or even when the next Drake album will be released, it has become clear that some people are gaming the market from the inside.
To make matters worse, Polymarket’s senior adviser is Donald Trump Jr., and his connections to the current administration hardly require further emphasis. But a recent federal criminal complaint in New York revealed that it is not just people with celebrity or political connections who can manipulate these “predictive markets.”
One aspect of Polymarket that is relatively new to online betting sites is that users are not betting “against the house.” None of the money people win actually comes from the platform itself. Instead, what happens on the site — which officially describes itself as a “peer-to-peer decentralized prediction market” — is that all the money placed on a wager gets divided among the winners.
It is now becoming very apparent that, in this prediction market, not everyone is gambling with the same amount of information.
