Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

Of course he should be punished but the best lesson here is for bettors. Those who wager on "prediction markets": you are betting against people who have access to more information or can influence the outcome of the wager. Don't waste your money.

So, after doing some light Googling and AI research, this doesn’t seem to be strictly an “insider trading” charge from the SEC.

It looks more like a broader fraud case. The charges are commodities fraud / Commodity Exchange Act violation, wire fraud, and money laundering, and the case is being brought by the DOJ.

So, lawyers, please correct me if I’m wrong, but this feels more like prosecutors found a legal framework to charge him for conduct that resembles insider trading. By contrast, if he had sold Google stock based on insider knowledge, that would have more directly implicated SEC insider trading rules.

So, functionally, it feels like an insider trading case, but technically, it isn’t one.

I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.

The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.

And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.

> He did not enter a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond

I'm not familiar with the US system of bond. Is this payment a kind of fine that you don't get back, or a temporary payment? And what does it give you? I mean if prosecuted you get prison anyway, right?

That's aweful, only senators should be allowed to do that!

Interesting to see that insider trading is considered illegal after all.

When will the white house insiders see the same fate?

Why are we wasting government money cracking down on Polymarket betting? The most offensive thing in this article is the government pretending Polymarket bets are securities. Prediction markets provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.

If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.

- Paul Newman

Pretty ironic find: Extracting knowledge from cryptocurrencies - Michele Spagnuolo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P04hm7tmgs

I’m completely failing to get outraged here.

I think that the person misused Google internal information and deserves termination or other discipline, but I’m struggling to otherwise see the harm in what they did. Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets? Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?

Interesting the federal government can't seem to find the resources to investigate their own internal insider trading related to war and foreign policy.

Anderson Cooper: But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.

Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polymarket-ceo-shayne-coplan-on...

If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.

Maybe there’s a chance he can get pardoned before 2029 lol

What would happen if some regular Joe, completely unrelated to any other user, watched for bets that could signal insider information and made significant profit themselves, too?

If he had made less money doing it he probably would have gotten away with it.

NSA employees must be the final boss of this kind of stuff.

Well at least if they were gambling they wouldn't be in danger of arrest.

A few more cases like this and people will go back to gambling

So are we going to regulate these things or what?

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/us/how-prediction-markets...

So now the real bet he lost is salary + time for all those years he is going to prision + lower job for decades after prison. This person bet Millions to get $1M basically and lost both, very rare gambling level lost from smart(used to) person. At least normal gambler loses what they have and some debt.

And that lad is of course an information security engineer

polymarket should be illegal, challenge me.

I am confused. Are bets considered securities? I thought the CFTC and insider dealing laws applied to securities, not betting.

Like it’s nice to see someone get charged for using insider knowledge to win at prediction markets, but are we seriously just going to say this is the first big case and not any of the suspiciously accurate accounts created immediately before Iran War events?

I fucking hate this double standard hypocrisy. Leading by example means if your political or corporate leaders can game the system then so can you, I say.

Forbes flagged this account back in December and it still took prosecutors months to charge him.

So they hanged a nobody while the person who made even more with white house insider trading announcements by the president goes scotch free?

I’m curious how he got caught. Polymarket accounts should be untraceable

How could this be insider trading? Polymarket has nothing to do with financial securities. A bet on Polymarket is like trading any other crypto asset.

Meanwhile His Royal Highness is free to do as he please. Got even life time immunity deal as well

Anyone could have run the list of candidate names from the bets through google trends right?

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301808

Is that even illegal?

Wow. WTF does this say about Google algorithmic manipulation if an employee can predict specific search results to such a granular extent... Down to a specific artist. Google is rigged.

[dead]