SBF's right-hand woman praised for testimony – and jailed for two years The former CEO of Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison, has been sentenced to two years in a minimum-security prison after pleading guilty to helping her former boyfriend Sam Bankman-Fried siphon billions out of the FTX exchange. Ellison admitted that she had falsified banking documents and drained customers' assets out of the …
I called him Some Banking Fraud right from the beginning of this affair
Every federal sentence against crypto-scammers is music to my ears, as a welcome promise that companies will never again try to push that garbage NFT crap in their product line ever again. I don't condone witch burning, but apparently the industry was outright begging for it so they can get their behavior straight. I do hope various CEOs and CFOs are paying attention to this so they realize the "next hot scam" isn't worth time in the big house.
that Ms Ellison might be the smartest of that crew.
Amongst the USD 11 billions who would have noticed a few millions inconspicuously squirrelled away?
I imagine a Keyser Söze like figure from The Usual Suspects who as Roger Verbal Kint convinced the authorities of his minor, or insignificant role.
A good story but realistically I imagine they were all actually just a bunch of incompetent dumb arses, and hers being the prettiest she got off lightly.
Beauty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder, but I'm fairly confident she wasn't treated with leniency on account of her looks.
More to the point, she flipped immediately, returning to the USA, turned herself in and offered to cooperate fully the moment it was clear they were all going down, providing evidence against her co-conspirators. And then she accepted full responsibility for her involvement in the fraud during the trial.
Compare to SBF, who did pretty much the opposite of all of those things, in addition to multiple breaches of his bail conditions including attempts to intimidate witnesses.
"I'm fairly confident she wasn't treated with leniency on account of her looks."
Hmm. You can usually tell if a statement is misogynistic by considering whether someone would have said the same thing about a man; I say it's unlikely in this case. So I'm hereby waving my "not cool, dude" card.
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Your "sic" is important here. I was working on the assumption that the rules of grammar had been at least vaguely followed by the OP. To aid you in understanding my interpretation, I have used bold for emphasis:
"A good story but realistically I imagine they were all actually just a bunch of incompetent dumb arses, and hers being the prettiest she got off lightly."
This reading suggests that her story was the prettiest. If the intended phrasing was:
"and she, being the prettiest, got off lightly",
then yes, that is very much not okay either. But the OP was already downvoted to hell, so I was kind of ignoring them. Whatever the intent of the OP, the reply to them was not helpful, as it perpetuates the idea that women can only get what they want by looking a certain way rather than by merit, and if they fail to look a certain way, then they have – by implication – somehow failed in some way and should be mocked for their looks. That is not okay, and I stand by calling it out.
She likely realised, or listened to advice, that she could end up being the sacrificial lamb as she was the link between the companies. Get a good plea deal, be on your best behaviour and don't kick off. SBF on the other hand looks like the type where his parents have enabled his every whim and he's never faced the consequences for his actions at any time in his life until now.
The deeper you look into the FTX debacle the more you might think his parents directed the whole damn thing.
His father the highly paid consultant...
His mother and brother directing where the ill gotten gains should be spent... (they would say donated but that's semantics)
The multimillion dollar house in the Bahamas FTX bought for them...
Because if that's what you get for 100% cooperation, complete and total honesty and confessing your own offences, her former colleagues who had to be extradited to get them before the court, and who have been somewhat less than completely and totally honest about what they did, and have done their best to shift blame elseware are obviously going to receive much heavier sentences.
Once she's served her time I'm sure there will be a bunch of filmmakers wanting to pay her for her knowledge so that they can produce a series about this whole saga. Would she be allowed to keep the money from this? Would it be classed as profiting from crime? Not sure on the law here.
Sometimes convicted parties aren't allowed to keep such money. A case this week, widely publicized here in the Boston area, involves a woman who murdered her 5-year-old son. She got 55+ years and was also specifically forbidden from getting any money for any stories about her, with a long list of possible ways she couldn't do so.
Legally I guess she'd get to keep it assuming she's returned the full $11bn (!) of FTX holdings required by this ruling, which seems essentially certain. It's a very grey area morally though, at best I guess you could frame it not as profiting from the crime but rather as profiting from the forthright honesty since?
There are so-called "Son of Sam" laws in some states, though they have been challenged on First Amendment grounds and most have been invalidated1,2. Any that remain have restricted applicability.
It seems unlikely that any Federal law exists, based upon the state laws challenged.
Netflix, here we come. . .
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She will be allowed to take receipt of the funds. But there's a catch.
Although the criminal litigation against her has concluded, her guilty plea opens the door to civil litigation from people at Alameda who had losses. So there will be little chance she will keep income in excess of her requirements for living.
This may be true to some extent, but it's not entirely a tale of being exploited if $11 billion of other people's money ends up in your account and you were knowingly part of the con for quite a while is it? She could have decided to go to the authorities before the authorities came for her.
Exactly. And her own pronouncements while the scam was in motion hardly paint her as the meek victim. She comes across in her blog postings as arrogant and entitled. I guess she just had good legal advice, and unlike her co-conspirators actually had enough sense to act on it.
I guess she just had good legal advice, and unlike her co-conspirators actually had enough sense to act on it.
I'm sure some of that advice was as simple as "DON'T PISS OFF THE JUDGE!". That's got to be one of the first things they teach you in Lawyering 101.
It's amazing how many defendants seem to ignore that.
We won't name any famous defendants who've lost bigly at trial during the past year or two.
Calculation: A couple of years in Club Fed at Allenwood is 'fair exchange' for living it up in a Bahamas penthouse for half a decade while wrecking the finances of thousands.
Then a apres clink speaking tour and maybe a nice consultancy. . .
Kaplan praised Ellison for her forthrightness and noted that she appeared sincerely driven by an Effective Altruism philosophy rather than greed. And he credited her claim that her on-and-off romantic entanglement with Bankman-Fried made her vulnerable.1
Yep, Effective Altruism begins at home.
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1https://news.yahoo.com/news/caroline-ellison-jail-time-her-100003326.html
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