FTX whistleblower Caroline Ellison set for early release next month

21 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by jxmorris12

45 Comments

glerk

13 hours ago

> whistleblower

This is… an interesting spin.

mingus88

13 hours ago

Yeah, cooperative testimony after the fact does not a whistleblower make

> She has agreed to a 10-year ban from holding executive roles in public or crypto companies.

Yeah, I don’t think this will be hard for her. Anyone involved in FTX is radioactive. Whoever negotiated this for her as a concession is brilliant.

Aurornis

13 hours ago

I’ve never seen invezz.com before, but this whole article feels oddly favorable to Caroline Ellison

fruitworks

13 hours ago

the pic they use also seems AI generated

runjake

13 hours ago

The image header appears to be an AI-generated and certainly doesn't look like Ellison, despite the image's name.

It doesn't bode well for the rest of the article.

pants2

13 hours ago

Yep, aside from the fact that photography isn't allowed in US Federal Court, the most obvious sign is that she and the microphone are facing away from the judge - the positioning makes no sense.

That's the classic AI photo issue where "man looking at the moon" is a man looking at the camera with the moon behind him.

achille

12 hours ago

I ran some analysis on the source image — this is almost certainly AI-generated. In addition to the visual markers others noted (no photography in federal court, nonsensical positioning), here's what comes up in the original image:

  Filename: ..._simple_compose_01kdcxamjmekery2m9tay43szn.png
    - "simple_compose" + LSB common (e.g ideogram) output 

  Resolution: 1536x1024
    - Exact native output of GPT-image-1, Gemini/Imagen, Flux models

  PNG encoder fingerprint: 0x78 0xDA | single IDAT | 94.7% Average filter
    - Matches PIL/Pillow with optimize=True

  Steganographic watermark:
    - LSB entropy: 3.0/3.0 (maximum)
    - Bits 0-3 of RGB channels filled with encrypted payload
    - ~1.77 MB of pseudorandom data embedded

dfajgljsldkjag

11 hours ago

Thanks for letting us know what your chatgpt told you

achille

11 hours ago

The analysis and tools were most definitely ai-aided, but this was done with homegrown forensics tooling, and about an hour of labor that involved cc, gemini (to check for synthid), chatgpt + a lot more. I also signed up for ideogram and generated more images to try and replicate the output: - e.g: https://ideogram.ai/g/fcqp-qTlQV-moS-OuhebhQ/1 (although I refused to pay for ideogram so I could not get a png output, only jpg)

mingus88

13 hours ago

Could be, but I’m sure the past few years have aged her pretty severely. She’s 31 now and the later ones are city miles.

chollida1

13 hours ago

> She has agreed to a 10-year ban from holding executive roles in public or crypto companies.

Judging by how Alemeda research was provided with as much money as they wanted with zero interest rate attached and she still ran the company into the ground, I don't think the ban will hurt her too much.

This really goes to show that most hedge funds are successful because of the infrastructure built around them rather than the people.

You need both to be successful, but good systems and infrastructure trump good people most of the time. RenTech is the best example of this.

No one is going to trust her to run a Baskin Robbins, much less put her in a role with any responsibility now.

kirubakaran

13 hours ago

> No one is going to trust her to ...

I wish I had your optimism:

> Adam Neumann’s Flow raises over $100M at $2.5B valuation Backed by a16z, the ex-WeWork CEO's real estate platform targets global expansion. (2025)

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/h1uevrw1xe

JumpCrisscross

13 hours ago

I feel like it’s still debatable whether Neumann committed fraud or stupidity. Bankman-Fried, on the other hand, cooked the books.

daft_pink

12 hours ago

I feel like in Crypto world, they value how high you were able to get the plane flying and don’t care if you crashed and burned in the end.

inhumantsar

6 hours ago

not all that different from the VC funded startup world then

dheera

13 hours ago

> She has agreed to a 10-year ban from holding executive roles in public or crypto companies.

So you can hold an executive role in a wholly owned private subsidiary of a public company, or hold a role in a Cayman Island company instead of a US company and have the Cayman entity buy the US entity. Rules like this don't actually do anything.

tptacek

13 hours ago

She was a model cooperator and was sentenced only to 2 years, so this isn't a surprising outcome.

rasz

13 hours ago

But she was never a whistleblower. Whistleblower is someone who goes to feds, not someone forced in court to cooperate.

tptacek

13 hours ago

No, of course not; she was a felon, and was convicted of felonies and sentenced to federal prison.

michaelt

13 hours ago

Once again proving that stealing $20 carries a longer sentence than white collar criminals stealing $200,000,000.

JumpCrisscross

13 hours ago

> proving that stealing $20 carries a longer sentence than white collar criminals stealing $200,000,000

Who has been prosecuted for stealing $20?

tptacek

13 hours ago

It in fact does not.

allyouseed

13 hours ago

It in fact does, but this fact appears outside your sphere of interest in defending.

> suspected that Floyd had used a counterfeit $20 bill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd#Murder

tptacek

13 hours ago

Floyd was never charged, let alone convicted, for stealing $20, and we're talking about federal crimes here.

allyouseed

13 hours ago

Polish that turd all you want.

Why you want to remains a mystery to me.

lowmagnet

12 hours ago

he was just murdered instead

skullone

13 hours ago

But it shows that there's really no penalties for the rich to commit billions in fraud

mikkupikku

13 hours ago

Bankman-Fried is doing 25 years in prison. That's the average prison sentence for murder. The message being sent is that you should turn on your partners in crime now and save yourself a lot of suffering in the long run.

jahnu

13 hours ago

I think people have no handle on what years and decades of life lost to prison means. The numbers are just abstract to them.

JumpCrisscross

13 hours ago

> it shows that there's really no penalties for the rich to commit billions in fraud

She’s a felon, banned “from holding executive roles in public or crypto companies,” penniless and probably fighting lawsuits for the rest of her life.

amanaplanacanal

13 hours ago

Not as long as you are willing to roll on the other guy. This has always been the way.

ralph84

13 hours ago

It's more about who you defrauded. Bernie Madoff died in prison because he defrauded other rich people.

Rebelgecko

13 hours ago

As long as they have someone "worse" to snitch on

hamonrye

8 hours ago

>outstanding liabilities

SilverElfin

13 hours ago

I don’t see her as any less guilty than Sam. If I recall, she directly was involved in the movement of people’s funds into Alameda - that was not something she got tricked into by some separate criminal mastermind. That’s her. Even if she cooperated, she should be serving 10+ years. Otherwise what’s the deterrent when you can mostly get away with large white collar crimes.

While we’re at it, Musk should also face charges for related fraudulent claims about self driving, battery tech that went nowhere, robotaxis, and other things. But he likely won’t. In general, these crimes are treated far too leniently for the rich and connected.

bragr

13 hours ago

The counter argument is if you don't incentivize flipping enough, it is the prisoners' dilemma: the option of everyone keeping their mouth shut and potentially going free is too attractive compared to flipping.

NoToP

12 hours ago

Umm, I think you may have been misinformed what the Nash equilibrium is in the prisoners dilemma

zoklet-enjoyer

13 hours ago

>FTX fraudster Caroline Ellison set for early release next month

Fixed it

constantcrying

13 hours ago

It is just so insane that the web is just full of 100% AI generated slop.

The title image is AI and presumably the text is AI generated, this appears to be true for everything on that website. Just 100%, everything AI generated, likely zero human oversight and fully automated.

And it even has auto translation which turns the whole page into literal nonsense, but surely looks good for SEO.

dfajgljsldkjag

11 hours ago

I don't know why nobody has figured out a way to block all this slop automatically. Instead we have to waste time flagging junk like this off the frontpage and sorting through it in the google results.

Sites like this have literally zero value for all society and shouldn't exist let alone make money for the owners.

user

13 hours ago

[deleted]