A Google employee was charged with commodities fraud for using insider information to win a Polymarket bet about who the most searched for people would be in 2025 (complaint, article, polymarket account).

So far the internet seems confused whether or not this all counts as commodities fraud at all or not and if so, how (this area of law is way too confusing which is one of the reasons I, of course, never use insider information to bet on polymarket).

It looks like the suspicious trades were discussed on social media back in december. e.g. here for example.

Aside: 1.2 million in profit is significant, but isn't a life changing amount of money for most staff engineers at Google. He probably could have just rested and vested for a few extra years and avoided all this...

Bonus:

According to Polymarket someone else was charged with insider trading this April. This other case is especially cursed because it involved bets around the US attacking Venezuela. According to the complaint he might have asked an LLM for legal advice:

In or about November 2025, VAN DYKE uploaded to his Google account a screenshot displaying the results of a Google Al query. The results stated, in substance and in part, that the U.S. military's special operations divisions have "numerous classified files, records, and operational details that are not available to the public"

It looks like this was his polymarket account.