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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.
That's sort of the point of prediction markets: they surface insider information by allowing people to profit off of it. The benefit is to people watching the prices, who can then use that information to make better decisions ahead of the answer being revealed to the public. It's not necessarily to market participants, who need to be aware of who else is trading the market and have a credible reason to believe they have better information.
Yup, same with any kind of betting - sport, even draw games. There are obviously stories that someone managed to "game the system", like a man who figured out how to find winning scratch cards (Mohan Srivastava case) or Željko Ranogajec winning in Keno, but the point is that in the first case it was luck + skills, in the second it was overcoming the TOS by creating a lot of fake accounts, that's why the guy had to give his win back (details of the agreement were not revealed).

You bet against skilled people who set the stakes, so, yes, by observing numbers you can win in Keno, but if you comply to the TOS you will not win big money. The only chance to be able to "game the system" is to bet on something that lotteries brokers does not have time to look at, like 3rd Bulgarian bocce league matches.

The problem is that you need to somehow become an expert in 3rd Bulgarian bocce league and the money which are there are generally small.

I was investigating this (again) when AI showed up, as in theory it makes easier some analysis, but the big guys are also using AI.

I read a data point that 78% of profits are made by 1% of users on Kalshi
Also, at least on Polymarket, beware of those who can influence the settlement of the wager, which may settle not in concordance with the actual outcome in reality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1jki1lj/pol...

We would be much better off as society if bettors and gamblers actually learned from their lessons. Unfortunately that's not how it works.
The real money is in providing liquidity if you don't have insider knowledge.
That's a very naive take of someone who never professionally traded. There are liquidity providing, market making trading strategies that work in absence of insider information.
that's literally how ANY market works. there's nothing special about prediction markets.

if you know NVDA's earnings before it's announced, it's no different than knowing who the most googled musician would be before it's announced.

Who says you have to bet against them? In Polymarket you can choose either side of a bet.
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.

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

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

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?

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

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

If he had made less money doing it he probably would have gotten away with it.
Interesting the federal government can't seem to find the resources to investigate their own internal insider trading related to war and foreign policy.
NSA employees must be the final boss of this kind of stuff.
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.
So they hanged a nobody while the person who made even more with white house insider trading announcements by the president goes scotch free?
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.
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...

Anyone could have run the list of candidate names from the bets through google trends right?
polymarket should be illegal, challenge me.
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?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301808
I am confused. Are bets considered securities? I thought the CFTC and insider dealing laws applied to securities, not betting.
Forbes flagged this account back in December and it still took prosecutors months to charge him.
And that lad is of course an information security engineer
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.
Meanwhile His Royal Highness is free to do as he please. Got even life time immunity deal as well
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.

Wait what? What "bets"? Bets can happen only on the gambling sites, and Polymarket is definitely not one of those, right? Poly is a prediction market, rewarding the person with the best prediction. How can there be "insider trading" on a site rewarding best information? The USA corporate and regulatory hypocrisy is off the charts :)
Isn't this been what some (so far) unnamed Trump administration people have been doing?
I’m curious how he got caught. Polymarket accounts should be untraceable
prediction markets have become like the "modern" version of crypto "get rich quick" mania of the nft era.

grifters gonna grift where they see an opportunity. also got the money printer turned on for some while the others resort to "chance" (fair or otherwise) to get paid.

Is that even illegal?