FBI: Googler who knew outcome of bets in advance made $1.2M profit on Polymarket.
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FBI says Google engineer used internal search data to win $1.2M on Polymarket
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No, prosecuting the insiders who've made money on policy decisions from the White House would show your commitment to rooting out insider trading.
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Instructables can be Confusable
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
But doing the same thing as a member of the current regime?
Totally fine.
All these "market futures" platforms are just insider trading, but let's obfuscate our activity and fleece the rubes at the same time.
Totally fine.
All these "market futures" platforms are just insider trading, but let's obfuscate our activity and fleece the rubes at the same time.
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Isn't this the expressed point of "prediction markets?" That someone "in the market" already knows the outcome? Otherwise everyone would just be gambling and that's definitely not what's going on here /s-ish
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Polymarket is basically just an auction house for information leaks at this point.
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"Promoting market integrity in prediction markets?" Why bother? They never had any to begin with.
Anyone dumb enough to bet millions of $$$ on random statistics in unregulated casinos should expect to get fleeced.
Anyone dumb enough to bet millions of $$$ on random statistics in unregulated casinos should expect to get fleeced.
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Thank god so many criminals are so greedy and so dumb. Michele, I think you are unclear on how this concept of "money laundering" works.
I don't want to give away the game to any other hapless idiots who might be thinking of doing their very own "prediction market" fraud, but for the rest of you, it's ixnay on the erfectpay.
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Remember the first rule of millionaire's club: Don't take money from other millionaires unless you know 100% you can get away with it. Or have your own fall guy(s).
There are enough stories about this happening. Is it so prevalent that everyone and their mother is betting so we are capturing more of the less-intelligent fraudsters or are we actually enforcing the laws more readily?
Or because Trump Co. probably got hit so they're bitter.
There are enough stories about this happening. Is it so prevalent that everyone and their mother is betting so we are capturing more of the less-intelligent fraudsters or are we actually enforcing the laws more readily?
Or because Trump Co. probably got hit so they're bitter.
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Remember, this is the CEO of Polymarket:
Trump has had a grudge against Google for a long time, so of course his Department of Retribution is going to make an example of one of them while studiously ignoring the fire coming from their own kitchen.
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Praefectus
So, we're going with catching individual pickpockets, instead of shutting down these guilds of thieves?
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When I was at Google 10+ years ago, this kind of thing would have been incredibly easy to do. I was an engineer on AdWords, and I had access to the "stats tables" that contained aggregated data on every click on an AdWords ad. At the time (and probably still now) those ad clicks were a large portion of Google's total revenue. It would have been trivial to write a MapReduce job to add up the cost of all those clicks and make bets based on the result.
I did have to get permission to access those tables, but any reasonable justification was accepted. One year I even got permission for my summer intern to access them. (He was trying to build a ML model to predict how much revenue an ad would bring in, based only on data we had at ad submission time, in order to prioritize ad reviews. It worked, but we decided FIFO was better.)
At the time they were only worried about insider stock / option trading because prediction markets weren't as big a deal. Every employee was treated as an "insider", and we weren't allowed to make any trades within 6 weeks before an earnings report.
It's mind boggling that this engineer risked their lucrative job — and prison — to make a few more bucks. To quote one of the corporate compliance lawyers I interacted with: "Hire the 'world's smartest people' and watch them do the stupidest things."
Edit: I just looked at the complaint. The defendant was a "Staff Software Engineer". When I was at that level, I was making over $200k base salary. The annual bonus and stock awards usually made it over $300k. I assume the costs of living in Mountain View and Switzerland are similar, so this guy's compensation was probably in the same ballpark. It's amazing that he somehow thought that wasn't enough.
I did have to get permission to access those tables, but any reasonable justification was accepted. One year I even got permission for my summer intern to access them. (He was trying to build a ML model to predict how much revenue an ad would bring in, based only on data we had at ad submission time, in order to prioritize ad reviews. It worked, but we decided FIFO was better.)
At the time they were only worried about insider stock / option trading because prediction markets weren't as big a deal. Every employee was treated as an "insider", and we weren't allowed to make any trades within 6 weeks before an earnings report.
It's mind boggling that this engineer risked their lucrative job — and prison — to make a few more bucks. To quote one of the corporate compliance lawyers I interacted with: "Hire the 'world's smartest people' and watch them do the stupidest things."
Edit: I just looked at the complaint. The defendant was a "Staff Software Engineer". When I was at that level, I was making over $200k base salary. The annual bonus and stock awards usually made it over $300k. I assume the costs of living in Mountain View and Switzerland are similar, so this guy's compensation was probably in the same ballpark. It's amazing that he somehow thought that wasn't enough.
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I wonder how many other of these go on everyday. This guy just happened to be one that they caught.
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Sort of ethics is the perfect phrase to encapsulate how modern tech bro and finance wunderkind pull the wool over everybody else.
How do we sell everybody on us getting incredibly rich and everyone else getting nothing? Quick, pay somebody to do an ethics about it!
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Maybe a solution to this would be to not allow betting on things where the outcome is known in advance.
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I figured that out in high school when I found some test keys. Getting everything right is suspicious, but Bs & As don't draw attention. Others got caught, but I never did.
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Let me get this straight. An Italian citizen, living in Switzerland, made bets on a gambling website that was originally banned in the US. Said website was given regulatory freedom by President Trump while his son, Trump Jr., is an advisor at the company. The president who got the Justice Department to force the IRS to never investigate his or his family's finances ever again.
The Italian got arrested and transported to NYC for his charges. And the Italian is the one facing potentially 50 years in prison for winning $1.2 million dollars?
Fuck this administration.
The Italian got arrested and transported to NYC for his charges. And the Italian is the one facing potentially 50 years in prison for winning $1.2 million dollars?
Fuck this administration.
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Woah, woah, don't use THAT word. Nobody is "betting" on Polymarket, otherwise it would be gambling, and that would be illegal.
However, my question is different. Where did the initial money come from. If the guy was able to
If I had 3M$ I'd probably just call it a day and retire, so I guess that he did lend them from someone, or something.
Bottom line: always get a loan from someone that will tell the authorities to look elsewhere. Otherwise you're going to jail. Or to the morgue. Or both. Suggestion: stay away from coffee for a while.
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These predictions markets are just an end-run around regulation. No positive outcomes to be had.
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The corrupt DOJ needs to look at their own people in this regime. There is all kinds of insider, trading and corruption going on
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I find it so precious how he says it's important to be clear about where the line is, when the line is obviously as blurry as possible.
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If it's Zurich, I believe cost of living is probably about 30% more expensive that Mountain View. In any case, a Google Staff Software Engineer in Zurich is probably getting around $500k in total compensation. And the fact that he bet $2.7M shows that he definitely had money to burn (or may indicate this isn't his first time and only just got caught). With that amount of money, he could have retired early like these people: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/flo...e-job-in-switzerland-for-mini-retirement.html
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In that sense, it's definitely not gambling. It's not a million miles off just being a straight pyramid scheme.
A few folks have inside knowledge of a given outcome and are happy to take everyone else's money.
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Would point out that there’s a fair bit of selection bias here
As in general we only are hearing about the ‘criminals’ greedy and dumb enough (or not protected by privilege) to be this obvious.
We have no real idea if they’re the many or the few when compared to actual numbers
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That is arguably how justice in the United States has generally always worked. We always ignore the big fish and real source of an issue and instead find a scape-goat with less power to use as an example - with the goal being to distract you from the big fish. Welfare queens, immigrants, transgender people... This old playbook does not seem to change.
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The only time I did this was back in 2020 when there were still people voting "no" on obvious senate election results, weeks after the election results were known to be "yes" (for at least one DNC senator) - tied into the whole election fiasco. The site (maybe polymarket? Or some other?) was offering $10 to join, so I did, collected $20, cashed out and have never been back.
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I wonder how much profit Polymarket made on all of this fraud? I notice they aren't being asked to disgorge too.
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Just out of curiosity, how was this guy jailed? He set his foot on the US while traveling? And how can someone who doesn't live in the US, betting through an international site, be accused of a crime in the US?
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"So... I'm thinking of a number. I'll wager that I know what it is... and you don't."
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Only members of the administration are allowed to inside trade, not lowly programmers.
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So, an Italian citizen, using a tool that's available to anyone in the company (and probably working at non-US subsidiary) to get information...which if anyone can get to it could hardly be called confidential, to place a bet in Switzerland on Polymarket, where only Polymarket US is regulated by the CFTC*, somehow runs afoul of the US CFTC? And accused of money laundering when none of the money was actually in the US? Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't there be jurisdiction issues with this?
I'm not condoning his actions, I'm only saying that this doesn't seem to be a US issue and raises all sorts of international issues.
* from Polymarket website
I'm not condoning his actions, I'm only saying that this doesn't seem to be a US issue and raises all sorts of international issues.
* from Polymarket website
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