The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday charged two former colleagues of disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried with helping him orchestrate a years-long scheme to defraud investors in FTX, the crypto trading platform that collapsed last month.
The executives — Caroline Ellison, who served as co-CEO of Alameda Research, a hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried, and Gary Wang, FTX’s former chief technology officer — helped Bankman-Fried divert FTX customer funds to the hedge fund while misleading investors about it, the SEC alleges. The agency also alleges Ellison, acting at Bankman-Fried’s direction, manipulated the price of FTT, a digital token issued by FTX that the executives used to mislead investors about the health of their businesses.