The post Why did Caroline Ellison get such a light sentence? appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Prosecutors and the defense alike argued Caroline Ellison should be sentenced to time served—and without her, the scale of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crimes may never have been uncovered. Caroline Ellison was a key member of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, turning into a star witness against him during a high-stakes trial last year. Ellison was the former CEO of Alameda Research, the sister trading firm of FTX, which collapsed in 2022 after a multibillion-dollar black hole emerged in the exchange’s finances. A damning investigation later revealed that FTX customer funds had been used to make risky bets without the customers’ knowledge, with Alameda being given a secretive “backdoor” that allowed the hedge fund to withdraw seemingly endless amounts of money. While she could have faced up to 110 years behind bars, an early guilty plea made it unlikely she’d spend the rest of her life in prison—and in a rare turn of events, both the prosecution and the defense called for her to be sentenced to time served. At a courtroom in Manhattan on Tuesday, Ellison apologized to all those who lost money at FTX. She said “not a day goes by” where she doesn’t reflect on the harm caused to the many innocent victoms. “The human brain is truly bad at understanding big numbers. I participated in a criminal conspiracy that ultimately stole billions of dollars from people who entrusted their money with us.”Ellison In a sympathetic note to Judge Lewis Kaplan, prosecutors praised her “extraordinary cooperation with the government” and said this should be reflected in her punishment. The note concluded: “The government cannot think of another cooperating witness in recent history who has received a greater level of attention and harassment. The attendant professional consequences of this level of notoriety are obvious and unlikely to be shortlived. Throughout, however,…

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Filed under: News - @ September 24, 2024 11:26 pm