Key U.S. government agencies charge Sam’s entourage with additional fraud charges

The arrested former FTX executive and Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges filed by the US department of justice, are now faced with additional charges by some U.S. government agencies. Ellison and Wang are being charged by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and The Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Ellison, the former Alameda Research CEO, pleaded guilty on 22 Dec. to the second count charge, while Wang to pleaded guilty to four counts.  

The new charges from the SEC stated that Ellison and Wang were “charged for their role in the “multiyear scheme to defraud equity investors in FTX,” with the SEC also investigating whether other securities laws were violated as well.”

CFTC, who already charged former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in a file on Dec. 13th, amended the file to have Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang as defendants in the charge. In the amended complaint, Ellison was charged with “fraud and material misrepresentations in connection with the sale of digital asset commodities in interstate commerce,” while Wang was charged with “fraud in connection with the sale of digital asset commodities in interstate commerce.”

For Wang, he was alleged by the SEC and CFTC to have “created FTX’s software code that enabled Alameda to divert customer funds from FTX.” The code however enabled Ellison to mismanage those funds for Alameda’s trading activities. 

According to SEC’s alleged charges, Ellison manipulated the price of FTT, which was stated as crypto security in the document, under the former FTX CEO’s direction, Sam Bankman-Fried.

The report had that the manipulation was conducted via buying off large quantities of the token from the crypto market resulting in an unnatural pump of FTT market prices; this was dated to have happened between 2019 and 2022. 

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