A Google engineer used insider data to rig Polymarket bets on D4vd search results

As if the statutory rape-murder saga unfurling around D4vd wasn’t gruesome enough, the story has earned one more level of degradation after the singer’s arrest: prediction markets are now involved. According to NBC, Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo was charged on May 21 with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering after using internal Google search data to bet on Polymarket that D4vd would be the most Googled person in 2025. Spagnuolo reportedly made over $1.2 million by trading on nonpublic Google data, placing bets under the username AlphaRaccoon between October and December of last year, when the odds of D4vd being Google’s most-searched person were “assigned a near-zero probability” by the prediction betting market. Google’s internal trend data, however, painted a much different picture, and Spagnuolo’s bets were correct: D4vd was the #1 searched person in Google’s year-end data in 2025, beating out Kendrick Lamar, Jimmy Kimmel, Charlie Kirk assassination suspect Tyler Robinson, and the new pope. 

When 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s remains were found in the trunk of a Tesla registered to D4vd under his legal name, David Anthony Burke, the internet went aflame with speculation around the artist’s involvement in the teenage girl’s death. After a months-long investigation, prosecutors alleged that Burke, who is now 21, was in an illegal relationship with Hernandez. In court, they’ve argued that when Hernandez threatened to publicize their relationship and ruin Burke’s music career, the singer lured her into his home and killed her. The case has become a spectacle of the 2020s, further dramatized by Burke releasing his debut album Withered the day after he allegedly murdered Hernandez and dismembered her body.

The complaint against Spagnuolo claims that the engineer “took deliberate steps to conceal his unlawful use of nonpublic information to obscure the source and ownership of his unlawful proceeds.” Jay Clayton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was much harsher: “Insider trading compromises the integrity of our markets,” he said of the charges against Spagnuolo, “and the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted.” Spagnuolo, who also bet on Zohran Mamdani, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and Sydney Sweeney being among the year’s top-searched people, has been placed on leave by Google.

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