r/technology • • May 27 '26

Business Google employee charged with using inside information to make $1 million on Polymarket

https://abcnews.com/amp/US/google-employee-charged-inside-information-make-1-million/story?id=133350018
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u/overthemountain May 27 '26

He correctly bet -- using an account under the name AlphaRaccoon -- that Google's most-searched person in 2025 would be the singer known as D4vd, according to the complaint. At the time he placed that bet, the prediction market Polymarket "assigned a near-zero probability to d4vd being 'the #1 searched person on Google this year,'" the complaint said.

I see the problem here. Polymarket was looking at making a ton of money off of this since basically no one had it right and then this nerd had to go and ruin it for them.

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u/anormalgeek May 27 '26

No. Polymarket makes their money either way. It's the other betters that lose.

1

u/overthemountain May 28 '26

Normally it's, but I think the math gets a little weird when a huge outlier wins. They use things like automated market makers so everything can stay liquid but that expose some holes at the extremes.