DANBURY, Conn. — Caroline Ellison started her two-year prison sentence Thursday for her part in a fraud that cost investors, lenders, and customers billions of dollars. Ellison was a top executive in Sam Bankman-Fried’s short-lived FTX cryptocurrency business.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons says Ellison, who is 30 years old, went to the federal jail in Danbury, Connecticut. Before Bankman-Fried, her ex-boyfriend was found guilty and given a 25-year prison term, she pleaded guilty and gave a lot of evidence against him.
Ellison could have spent decades in jail on her own, but the judge and the prosecutors both praised her for cooperating. At the hearing for her sentence in New York in September, she apologized through tears and said she was “deeply ashamed.”
Ellison was the CEO of Alameda Research, a bitcoin hedge fund that Bankman-Fried ran. Before it went out of business in 2022, FTX was one of the most well-known cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. It was famous for its Super Bowl ad and its large lobbying effort in Washington, D.C.
According to U.S. prosecutors, Bankman-Fried and other top execs stole money from customers’ exchange accounts and used it to buy risky investments, give millions of dollars to political campaigns without permission, bribe Chinese officials, and buy expensive real estate in the Caribbean.
Source: Caroline Ellison Begins 2-Year Prison Sentence for Involvement in Bankman-Fried’s FTX Fraud
