By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 26th, 2024
Following Sam Bankman-Fried’s nearly 25-year jail sentence for financial fraud, attention shifts to his former colleagues at FTX.
The recent sentence of nearly 25 years in jail for Sam Bankman-Fried for his part in financial fraud has brought attention to his former coworkers at FTX. Along with Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, Ryan Salame, and Nishad Singh, others are currently facing legal action as a result of the FTX relationship.
After Bankman-Fried was found guilty and sentenced, what will happen to his other co-conspirators? Some of them are helping the police, but that doesn’t mean they won’t end up in jail.
FTX Co-Conspirators Await Fate
Ryan Salame, who used to be co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, has a court date on May 1. Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried, who used to be CEO of FTX, and Salame were both involved in the same court case. At court, he admitted that he had given $10 million to political campaigns, which he wrongly said were loans and had no plans to repay.
Former FTX head of engineering Nishad Singh stated that in September 2022 he found a $8 billion financial discrepancy. Singh knew about it, but he still accepted transactions that he thought came from user deposits.
The funds were reportedly sent to Alameda Research, a trading company connected to Bankman-Fried. Singh has pleaded guilty, along with FTX CTO Gary Wang and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison. The case is still going on.
In December 2022, Ellison, who ran FTX’s affiliated hedge fund Alameda Research, accepted she was guilty. He has not been sentenced yet, though. When Bankman-Fried started working in the cryptocurrency industry, she was one of the first people he hired.
Singh is reported to have started working as a software engineer in California, Wang is working at a tech company, and Ellison is said to have moved back in with her parents, who are both teachers at MIT.
Working together with authorities might help some of them stay out of jail, but it’s not a sure thing. The sentences they get will depend on things like how bad the crimes were and how valuable the help was.
The prosecutors are going to send a 5-K letter explaining how cooperative each person was and asking for a shorter term, according to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison.
Similar to the case of Frank DiPascali, a major player in the Bernard Madoff scandal, whose sentencing was put off while he cooperated with prosecutors. Even though he helped the police, DiPascali died before he was sentenced. As Ellison, Wang, Salame, and Singh wait for their sentence, the crypto community is closely watching what will happen next.