One moved continents to hunker down in her family home. Another landed a job as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. And the third is pursuing a tech career outside crypto after the exchange he helped build imploded 16 months ago.
All three were once the closest associates of
On Thursday, Bankman-Fried was
“In the vast majority of white collar cases, the cooperators get zero jail time,” former federal prosecutor
But that doesn’t mean Ellison, Singh and Wang can rest easy. Former
Federal prosecutors say the FTX case is one of the largest financial frauds in US history — and the biggest of the past decade — putting it on par with the likes of Enron and
Ellison, 29, started discussing a potential cooperation agreement with the government after the FBI raided her parents’ home near Boston, seizing her cell phones, computer and journal. Wang, 31, suddenly left the Bahamas penthouse he shared with Bankman-Fried on Nov. 16 — less than a week after FTX declared bankruptcy — and joined his lawyers at the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan the next day. Singh, 28, who testified that he was suicidal after dealing with FTX’s collapse from its headquarters in the Bahamas, met with prosecutors a few days later.
Lawyers for Ellison, Singh and Wang either declined to comment or did not respond to requests.
The three executives pleaded guilty to fraud offenses in separate deals struck with prosecutors, agreeing to testify against Bankman-Fried, 32, in the hope of receiving lighter punishments.
Since then, they’ve kept low profiles and been at the beck and call of federal prosecutors. Singh, who left the Bahamas and moved back to California, has been volunteering at a homeless facility and with animal welfare organizations, according to people familiar with the former chief engineer. He is now working as a software engineer, one of the people said.
Wang, who spent his teenage years in New Jersey before meeting Bankman-Fried at MIT and later co-founding FTX, has been working for a tech company since early 2023, according a person with knowledge of his employment.
Ellison, who was in Hong Kong as FTX imploded in November 2022, returned to the US to stay with her parents — both MIT economists. It’s unclear if she is working again.
She provided the most damning testimony at Bankman-Fried’s trial. Ellison described how Bankman-Fried instructed her to make misleading balance sheets for investors to hide Alameda’s liabilities to FTX and how he chose to make risky investments despite knowing it would draw down on customer funds. Her on-again-off-again romantic relationship with the FTX co-founder added another layer of complexity.
“Caroline Ellison provided some emotional drama that drew the jury in and provided a picture of what happened,” Estes said.
“They were pretty central to the case in that they gave the jury a narrative,” she added. “It would have been hard to prove such a complicated case without an insider describing what happened.”
The government will prepare what’s known as a 5K letter for the judge outlining how helpful the cooperators were in the investigation, from any initial reluctance to come forward to the value of the information they provided. The fact that Judge
Ultimately, it will be up to Kaplan to decide whether they serve any prison time and how much they should pay in restitution. Apart from handing down the 25-year sentence, Kaplan said that Bankman-Fried — who had faced as long as 110 years behind bars — should forfeit more than $11 billion.
Singh has already agreed to forfeit a multimillion dollar property he bought in Washington’s San Juan Islands and shares in artificial intelligence startup
Ellison, Singh and Wang have settled actions brought by the
The trio are banned from acting as officers or directors of publicly traded companies – a standard condition in most white collar cases — but they are also largely banned from working in crypto trading again, according to the SEC agreements filed in court. That means their careers are unlikely to benefit significantly from crypto’s bounce back to record highs from a collapse since FTX’s blowup.
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Shelby Knowles
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