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

morkalork

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

yakbarber

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

ElenaDaibunny

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

wyldfire

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.

kingleopold

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.

827a

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...

kevmo314

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

ChrisArchitect

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

frakkingcylons

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

onlypassingthru

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

iririririr

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

solarkraft

Interesting to see that insider trading is considered illegal after all. When will the white house insiders see the same fate?

mortsnort

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.

burnhamup

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.

profsummergig

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

nielsbot

So are we going to regulate these things or what? See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/us/how-prediction-markets...

seydor

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