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Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

nytimes.com

201–210 of 338 posts

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#201

Does this cooperation mean that those fraudsters don't go to prison? The whole team knew about stealing billions of dollars of money, clearly there's more than 1 person (and more than 1 company's executives) that need prison time.

It means they get less prison time in exchange for helping prove the cases that give lots of prison time to others.

As the letter mentions, that's entirely up to the sentencing judge to decide. All the DOJ can do is to inform the judge that Ellison cooperated with them.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#202

Too bad HBO's Silicon Valley isn't still going. The writers would have had a field day.

I had the idea that they should just reboot the show with a new company to follow that's in the blockchain space. There's so many characters and fraudsters and just general shenanigans to riff off of.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#203

Any ideas why these prosecutions are moving forward so fast? Usually this stuff takes forever as evidence is carefully gathered. Curious if anyone has any insights here.

Despite the smoke and mirrors it is actually an incredibly basic crime to unravel.

In the modern era of email / slack / whatever - every smoking gun piece of evidence is a ctrl-f away. SBF is publicly testifying and pointing to where the bodies are buried, FTX the company is cooperating and co-conspirators are cooperating.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#204

Nothing here happened on a blockchain. If it had there wouldn't have been problems. This is a typical finance market scam.

Exactly, crypto was only peripherally related to the legacy financial fraud. But everyone, including this site, wants you to think this was a, "crypto bro's" scam, SBF was NOT a crypto bro, he was a rich kid.

It was traditional, centralized finance that kept this from spreading. But because it's crypto, they had effectively no auditing or reporting requirements. And part of the central grift was their FTT token.

Crypto was a major factor in this scam and others. True decentralized crypto will never be integrated into society. Crypto fundamentalists can't get past these things.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#205

There is a good chance SBF will be released on bail so he does not have to spend time in detention in NYC. The charges against him are all nonviolent crimes. The question I have is if the judge releases him from custody, "Will SBF do more interviews?" Lots of people are speculating on sentencing, some are comparing SBF to Holmes, but IMHO it's likely in this case he is going to plead guilty. Whatever comes out in a c…

>The question I have is if the judge releases him from custody, "Will SBF do more interviews?"

That's a funny question to consider. I wonder if this has sufficiently shattered his world-view such that he'll no longer do interviews.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#206

What about the previous CEO of Alameda, Sam Trabucco? Caroline only took over recently, I haven't heard anything about his legal standing at this point.

I think Sam Trabucco of FTX is going to be like Lou Pai of Enron. If you resign at exactly the right time and put some distance between you and the fraud, you can get away with it and ride off into the sunset. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=541142...

Nice comparison. Trabucco resigned in August but Caroline was on record saying he hadn’t been around for months. Some Alameda loans were called in May, and that is when SBF and Caroline did some obviously shady stuff. I think that is when he walked, as that is when the trading strategy became limited to just propping up FTT to fake the balance sheet. He seemed like a legit trader based on his Twitter. It takes about $3 million in legal bills to defend against the feds, and he easily has that kind of money. He is going to be hard to prosecute.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#207

What about the previous CEO of Alameda, Sam Trabucco? Caroline only took over recently, I haven't heard anything about his legal standing at this point.

I wonder why all the citizen jornalists havent been doing their digging and discovered the co-CEO

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She got 11 years of which she'll have to serve at least around 9 because it's federal, and that was for something that probably wasn't fraudulent from the very beginning. So, seems like they... won't be okay.

She got 11 years for not delivering 10x to the VC's. Just imagine what you would get for fucking with peoples health.

My imagination is awful, but I’m guessing somewhere around 0 years.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#209
post #159

What about the previous CEO of Alameda, Sam Trabucco? Caroline only took over recently, I haven't heard anything about his legal standing at this point.

I was wondering about Trabucco as well. His name is nowhere to be seen, but he was leading Alameda together with Caroline up until last summer. If SBF is also going for plea bargain, will various government institutions ask from him to get some dirt on Tether (and on Binance)? Might be that they are more interested in campaign financing.

> but he was leading Alameda together with Caroline up until last summer.

According to the SEC civil lawsuit against SBF, SBF was running Alameda the whole time, including when Ellison and Trabucco were nominally the co-CEOs. The CFTC lawsuit against SBF, FTX, Aand Alameda asserts the same, and that SBFs resignation as CEO of Alameda was done to create the false image of strong separation between Alameda and FTX.

Ellison apparently had a real role in the fraud, but I don’t know that it’s clear that Trabucco was anything other than a face set up as a distraction, in terms of substantive role.

Re: Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang are cooperating in the criminal case against SBF

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And gets out after 5 years for “good behavior”.

Federal sentences come with a maximum of 54 days per year [1] of good time credit, and there is no parole when serving federal time. This all but guarantees that a 10 year sentence will result in 102 months of incarceration and release no earlier than that. [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/02/11/2022-02...

> Federal sentences come with a maximum of 54 days per year [1] of good time credit, and there is no parole when serving federal time.

Right, to the extent a federal convict has supervised release time, its not “I got out early from my prison sentence” but “I was sentenced to supervised release on top of my prison sentence.”

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