SDNY, CFTC Charge Google Employee With Insider Trading on Polymarket

Google Employee Charged With Insider Trading

United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, and Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), James C. Barnacle, Jr., announced today the unsealing of a complaint charging MICHELE SPAGNUOLO, a/k/a “AlphaRaccoon,” a software engineer at Google, with commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering arising from his scheme to misappropriate confidential information from his employer and use that information to place a series of profitable Google-related trades on a prediction market platform. SPAGNUOLO, who resides in Switzerland, was presented today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in the Southern District of New York….

“Michele Spagnuolo allegedly abused his elevated access to confidential trends to place bets with nonpublic information and receive more than one million dollars in unlawful profits,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle, Jr. “The FBI remains dedicated to searching for fraudsters who betray their employer for personal financial gains.”

U.S. CFTC files request to erase Gemini settlement that it no longer considers fair

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission wants to tear up the remnants of an old dispute with crypto exchange Gemini, with the agency insisting that its own staff’s assertions about Gemini making misleading statements weren’t handled properly.

The CFTC filed a request alongside Gemini in federal court to negate a settlement secured at the start of last year, with the current agency essentially disputing the conclusions of the previous agency. After a review of the case, the CFTC “concluded the complaint should not have been filed — and would not have been under current enforcement standards,” it said in a Wednesday statement.

In January of 2025, Gemini agreed to resolve an enforcement action with a $5 million fine and other requirements, settling a matter that began in 2017. In meetings with the CFTC back then, its staff had determined that Gemini allegedly made false statements about the relative difficulty of manipulating bitcoin futures contracts and the regulator pursued an enforcement action in 2022.

Polymarket’s Losers Are Discovering an Age-Old Truth

… The retail participant who funds a Polymarket account and loses $300 over a year of trading on elections, geopolitics and Federal Reserve decisions is purchasing a piece of information about herself that she cannot obtain in any other way: Whether her judgment, the thing she has been operating on her whole life, is better or worse than the wisdom of crowds. For almost everyone, the answer turns out to be worse, and the rational response is to listen to the crowd. For a small number of people, the answer turns out to be better, and the rational response is to keep going. Either lesson is immensely valuable.

Cybersecurity-Related Securities Suit Hits Cloud Data Storage Company

For several years, cybersecurity has been a perennial D&O liability issue. Although there has never quite been the volume of cybersecurity-related D&O litigation that some anticipated, cybersecurity-related D&O claims do continue to arise. In the latest example, last week a plaintiff shareholder filed a securities suit against cloud data storage company Snowflake, alleging, among many other things, that the company failed to disclose shortcomings in its customer data security arrangements that allegedly allowed key customers to experience a data breach. There are a number of noteworthy aspects of this new complaint and its cybersecurity-related allegations, as discussed below. A copy of the plaintiff’s complaint can be found here.

Kirkland & Ellis to spend $500mn building its own AI technology

Kirkland & Ellis has set aside $500mn to create its own AI platform, as the world’s highest-grossing law firm seeks to develop proprietary technology rather than rely only on tools available to its competitors.

The US-based firm expects to spend more than $100mn this year and hundreds of millions more in the next three to four years developing custom AI services, its chair Jon Ballis told the FT. That is in addition to the money it will continue to spend on licences to use third parties’ AI tools.

“The idea is that we’re going to take the collective intelligence of our institution and be able to deploy that throughout our firm,” Ballis said.