Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang – who worked with disgraced FTX crypto crook Sam Bankman-Fried – avoided financial penalties in a slap-on-the-wrist settlement with US regulators that was revealed Wednesday.
Ellison, 31, the nerdy on-again, off-again ex-girlfriend of Bankman-Fried who ran his Alameda hedge fund before testifying against him, will be banned from trading for five years and from registering with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for 10 years, the agency said.
Wang, 33, FTX’s co-founder and chief technology officer, will be banned from trading for five years and from registering with the regulator for eight years, according to the agency’s press release.
The CFTC said it did not seek financial penalties or a return of ill-gotten profits from Ellison or Wang because of their extensive cooperation with authorities. Both had testified as prosecution witnesses against Bankman-Fried after the multibillion-dollar collapse of FTX and Alameda.
“Today’s resolution further underscores the high value this division places on robust cooperation,” CFTC Enforcement Director David Miller said in a statement.
“Ellison and Wang were senior executives who committed fraud at Alameda and FTX for which they were found liable. Their sanctions, however, reflect their material assistance in the Commission’s FTX-related investigations.”
The court-approved settlement followed FTX’s spectacular collapse in 2022, after the firm filed for bankruptcy and exposed an $8 billion scheme in which Bankman-Fried and his cronies stole customer funds from the crypto exchange to cover up losses at Alameda Research.
Bankman-Fried, 34, is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence – a steep fall from grace for a man once seen as a rising star of the crypto industry. In June, he lost his bid to overturn his 2023 fraud conviction, which found him guilty on all seven felony charges.
Ellison – who penned explicit, since-deleted blog posts about polyamory, sexual fantasies and her views on power and finance that resurfaced after the exchange’s collapse – pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison in 2024. She was released from federal custody in January after serving 14 months behind bars.
Ellison pleaded guilty to seven criminal counts, including fraud and conspiracy. She admitted to creating fake balance sheets that were shown to lenders to cover up Alameda’s demise.
At Ellison’s 2024 sentencing, Judge Lewis Kaplan praised her “substantial” cooperation with prosecutors but nevertheless said the extent of her crimes warranted 24 months of jail time. He also ordered her to forfeit $11 billion in assets.
Ellison’s bizarre digital footprint fueled a barrage of social media posts mocking her during the trial, and her eventual turn on Bankman-Fried in court was dramatic enough to inspire a Netflix miniseries.
The eight-episode limited series about the troubled scammer couple, titled “The Altruists” and starring Julia Garner as Ellison and Anthony Boyle as Bankman-Fried, is slated to hit screens on Nov. 19. The title nods to Bankman-Fried’s role as poster child for the “effective altruism” movement purportedly devoted to accumulating them most possible wealth to do the most possible good.
Wang and Nishad Singh, 30, FTX’s former head of engineering, both pleaded guilty and cooperated with authorities, but were sentenced to time served. That meant they didn’t need to spend any additional time in prison past the time they spent waiting for their trial.
In April, the CFTC said Singh needed to return $3.7 million in illicit profits and face a temporary trading and registration ban.
Ryan Salame, 32, a former FTX executive who did not cooperate with prosecutors, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison in 2024.