<story><title>Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/technology/elizabeth-holmes-sentence-theranos.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ftxbagholder123</author><text>I ended up losing a significant amount of money on the FTX debacle, and I want to demonstrate that even risk-aware people who tried to act relatively prudently can still end up losing money. I also want to argue that while most parties involved (myself included) made wrong decisions one way or the other throughout this -- and as a result are greatly suffering from the consequences -- that we should focus less on blaming the victims, and more on prosecuting the actual villains, while figuring out a clever way of preventing such large-scale fraud from happening again.&lt;p&gt;Here is my story:&lt;p&gt;- I put $50k into FTX last year. The reason for putting the money into FTX was because it was the only large-scale platform that allowed me to trade the specific token that I wanted to trade.
- My investment proved to be more successful than I had anticipated, and I turned the initial investment into $600k by the end of last year.
- By the spring of this year, I had sold my entire position and was now sitting with $400k USD on FTX (as I didn&amp;#x27;t sell everything at the top). 
- At that time, I attempted to withdraw the entire amount into my bank account, but immediately ran into issues with my bank.
- For background, I&amp;#x27;m a dual citizen, originally from South America but now living in the US. As you may be aware, US citizens were not allowed to use FTX.com; hence I used my South American citizenship to get verified by FTX, with the condition that I could only withdraw to a South American bank in my name.
- I spent about 10-20 hours this spring attempting to make the withdrawal, which included dozens of phone calls and emails with my bank as well as the FTX support team, in order to execute the transaction. But the process turned out to be more complicated than I had expected. 
- Full details are not necessary here as I wish to somewhat protect my identity, but it became clear to me that this process would be very difficult to complete unless I was physically present at the bank in South America.
- While I considered that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not risk-free, I deemed the risk relatively low. A part of that judgement was the fact that FTX was an exchange, and not a bank nor a prop-trading house, and thus I viewed the risk of a run on the bank scenario, or FTX speculating away my money in trading, as low.
- What instead worried me was that FTX could get hacked, or that the founders could take my money and run, but given the high-profile nature of the company and its founders, I made the call that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not an overwhelming risk factor.
- I also considered converting my money into BTC and transferring them to cold storage, but ended up not doing that as I worried about a crypto meltdown, and I reasoned that my money was safer sitting in USD at FTX (despite the aforementioned risks). I further reasoned, that given that the amount was already quite large, that it would be even harder to explain to a local bank where the money had come from once it had gone off an exchange and then come back on again.
- For all of these reasons, I decided to wait, and was planning to do the transfer in less than 2 months from today, once back in South America.&lt;p&gt;We obviously know what happened next, and we know that pretty much any other solution would have been better for me. But with the information available to me at the time, it wasn&amp;#x27;t obvious that what happened would happen. I believed I had reasoned appropriately about the risks and made the correct decisions at the time when I made them, with the information available at the time.&lt;p&gt;My point is that we don&amp;#x27;t know the stories behind why so many people kept their money on FTX. Perhaps some were more reckless than others, and perhaps someone reading this thinks that I was reckless too. But even so, in my view, none of us &amp;quot;deserved&amp;quot; to have this happen to us. So instead of vilifying the victims, the focus should be on holding the perpetrators responsible, while thinking of a better way forward so that this doesn&amp;#x27;t happen again. Thanks for reading.</text></item><item><author>jongjong</author><text>They are either industry saboteurs planted by big banking interests or they are complete imbeciles.&lt;p&gt;Same can be said about people who gave them money. It&amp;#x27;s just retarded. The whole business went completely against the core purpose of cryptocurrency. Anyone who invested in him or had their money sitting on his exchange (or any bankrupt exchange) deserved to lose it. It&amp;#x27;s scary to think what damage large amounts of capital could do in the hands of such idiots; society is better off now.</text></item><item><author>moralestapia</author><text>He may go for it but I don&amp;#x27;t think he will succeed.&lt;p&gt;Come on, this is a guy who had:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  * A company with a constant revenue stream in a business that could be pretty much 100% automated.
  * Backing from the largest investors and VC funds worldwide.
  * Valuable connections with people higher up in academia and the prevailing political party in the US (all the way up to the president).
  * All the money in the world and free reign over what to do with it.
  * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets.
  * A massive group of followers that found his antics particularly alluring and who were trusting him with their money more and more everyday.
  * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (ok, this one&amp;#x27;s sarcasm)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
And he &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; managed to f*ck it up. I don&amp;#x27;t think he&amp;#x27;s capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.</text></item><item><author>geraldwhen</author><text>I’d wager bankman-fried is going to disappear, or mysteriously die in India.&lt;p&gt;Gerry Cotton had far less money on the table and he supposedly died abroad.</text></item><item><author>ryoshu</author><text>FTX is over $1 billion and the table maxes out at $550 million, so that should be fun. Lawmakers should revisit that.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>In a previous thread, I had this at &amp;quot;more than 10 years, less than 60&amp;quot; (yeah, that&amp;#x27;s an easy bet to make!). The core driver of the sentence is probably the guidelines 2B1.1 table, which scales sentencing levels by economic losses. She was convicted for something like $140MM in fraudulent losses, which by themselves ask for a 24-level escalation (the table maxes out in the mid-40s).&lt;p&gt;By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here. Not to say that&amp;#x27;s an unjust outcome; the &amp;quot;lenient&amp;quot; option for sentencing on serious federal felonies is still quite harsh.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I tracked down the prosecutor&amp;#x27;s sentencing memorandum; they asked for 15 years. So I guess maybe not that lenient.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The PSR (the court&amp;#x27;s own sentencing memorandum, which the prosecution and defense respond to) had Holmes at level 43. I hereby claim that I called this. :P&lt;p&gt;But the PSR looks at the guidelines level table, which suggests 960 months for level 43, and instead recommends 108 months. So the court imposed a sentence higher than the PSR, lower than the prosecution asked, and all parties asked for much lower than the guideline maximum for the level.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m doing the math wrong; the guidelines range at that level is 240 months per charge (usually served consecutively). Still much higher than the ultimate sentence.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jongjong</author><text>Fair enough. It sounds like a real roller coaster ride of good luck followed by terrible luck. I understand that it&amp;#x27;s sometimes unavoidable to move tokens to an exchange when you are about to cash out. The timing was just really unfortunate.&lt;p&gt;I guess there is a lesson to be learned about investing in tokens which can only be acquired and disposed of on a single exchange; that is a bit of a red flag. Unfortunately, with crypto, it&amp;#x27;s better to be paranoid. Many governments and big banks don&amp;#x27;t want crypto to succeed so these kinds of major collapses are to be expected... I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if some of them may be orchestrated intentionally.</text></comment>
<story><title>Elizabeth Holmes is sentenced to more than 11 years for fraud</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/technology/elizabeth-holmes-sentence-theranos.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ftxbagholder123</author><text>I ended up losing a significant amount of money on the FTX debacle, and I want to demonstrate that even risk-aware people who tried to act relatively prudently can still end up losing money. I also want to argue that while most parties involved (myself included) made wrong decisions one way or the other throughout this -- and as a result are greatly suffering from the consequences -- that we should focus less on blaming the victims, and more on prosecuting the actual villains, while figuring out a clever way of preventing such large-scale fraud from happening again.&lt;p&gt;Here is my story:&lt;p&gt;- I put $50k into FTX last year. The reason for putting the money into FTX was because it was the only large-scale platform that allowed me to trade the specific token that I wanted to trade.
- My investment proved to be more successful than I had anticipated, and I turned the initial investment into $600k by the end of last year.
- By the spring of this year, I had sold my entire position and was now sitting with $400k USD on FTX (as I didn&amp;#x27;t sell everything at the top). 
- At that time, I attempted to withdraw the entire amount into my bank account, but immediately ran into issues with my bank.
- For background, I&amp;#x27;m a dual citizen, originally from South America but now living in the US. As you may be aware, US citizens were not allowed to use FTX.com; hence I used my South American citizenship to get verified by FTX, with the condition that I could only withdraw to a South American bank in my name.
- I spent about 10-20 hours this spring attempting to make the withdrawal, which included dozens of phone calls and emails with my bank as well as the FTX support team, in order to execute the transaction. But the process turned out to be more complicated than I had expected. 
- Full details are not necessary here as I wish to somewhat protect my identity, but it became clear to me that this process would be very difficult to complete unless I was physically present at the bank in South America.
- While I considered that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not risk-free, I deemed the risk relatively low. A part of that judgement was the fact that FTX was an exchange, and not a bank nor a prop-trading house, and thus I viewed the risk of a run on the bank scenario, or FTX speculating away my money in trading, as low.
- What instead worried me was that FTX could get hacked, or that the founders could take my money and run, but given the high-profile nature of the company and its founders, I made the call that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not an overwhelming risk factor.
- I also considered converting my money into BTC and transferring them to cold storage, but ended up not doing that as I worried about a crypto meltdown, and I reasoned that my money was safer sitting in USD at FTX (despite the aforementioned risks). I further reasoned, that given that the amount was already quite large, that it would be even harder to explain to a local bank where the money had come from once it had gone off an exchange and then come back on again.
- For all of these reasons, I decided to wait, and was planning to do the transfer in less than 2 months from today, once back in South America.&lt;p&gt;We obviously know what happened next, and we know that pretty much any other solution would have been better for me. But with the information available to me at the time, it wasn&amp;#x27;t obvious that what happened would happen. I believed I had reasoned appropriately about the risks and made the correct decisions at the time when I made them, with the information available at the time.&lt;p&gt;My point is that we don&amp;#x27;t know the stories behind why so many people kept their money on FTX. Perhaps some were more reckless than others, and perhaps someone reading this thinks that I was reckless too. But even so, in my view, none of us &amp;quot;deserved&amp;quot; to have this happen to us. So instead of vilifying the victims, the focus should be on holding the perpetrators responsible, while thinking of a better way forward so that this doesn&amp;#x27;t happen again. Thanks for reading.</text></item><item><author>jongjong</author><text>They are either industry saboteurs planted by big banking interests or they are complete imbeciles.&lt;p&gt;Same can be said about people who gave them money. It&amp;#x27;s just retarded. The whole business went completely against the core purpose of cryptocurrency. Anyone who invested in him or had their money sitting on his exchange (or any bankrupt exchange) deserved to lose it. It&amp;#x27;s scary to think what damage large amounts of capital could do in the hands of such idiots; society is better off now.</text></item><item><author>moralestapia</author><text>He may go for it but I don&amp;#x27;t think he will succeed.&lt;p&gt;Come on, this is a guy who had:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  * A company with a constant revenue stream in a business that could be pretty much 100% automated.
  * Backing from the largest investors and VC funds worldwide.
  * Valuable connections with people higher up in academia and the prevailing political party in the US (all the way up to the president).
  * All the money in the world and free reign over what to do with it.
  * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets.
  * A massive group of followers that found his antics particularly alluring and who were trusting him with their money more and more everyday.
  * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (ok, this one&amp;#x27;s sarcasm)
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
And he &lt;i&gt;still&lt;/i&gt; managed to f*ck it up. I don&amp;#x27;t think he&amp;#x27;s capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.</text></item><item><author>geraldwhen</author><text>I’d wager bankman-fried is going to disappear, or mysteriously die in India.&lt;p&gt;Gerry Cotton had far less money on the table and he supposedly died abroad.</text></item><item><author>ryoshu</author><text>FTX is over $1 billion and the table maxes out at $550 million, so that should be fun. Lawmakers should revisit that.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>In a previous thread, I had this at &amp;quot;more than 10 years, less than 60&amp;quot; (yeah, that&amp;#x27;s an easy bet to make!). The core driver of the sentence is probably the guidelines 2B1.1 table, which scales sentencing levels by economic losses. She was convicted for something like $140MM in fraudulent losses, which by themselves ask for a 24-level escalation (the table maxes out in the mid-40s).&lt;p&gt;By the numbers, the court was probably quite lenient here. Not to say that&amp;#x27;s an unjust outcome; the &amp;quot;lenient&amp;quot; option for sentencing on serious federal felonies is still quite harsh.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I tracked down the prosecutor&amp;#x27;s sentencing memorandum; they asked for 15 years. So I guess maybe not that lenient.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The PSR (the court&amp;#x27;s own sentencing memorandum, which the prosecution and defense respond to) had Holmes at level 43. I hereby claim that I called this. :P&lt;p&gt;But the PSR looks at the guidelines level table, which suggests 960 months for level 43, and instead recommends 108 months. So the court imposed a sentence higher than the PSR, lower than the prosecution asked, and all parties asked for much lower than the guideline maximum for the level.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29790880&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Later later edit&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m doing the math wrong; the guidelines range at that level is 240 months per charge (usually served consecutively). Still much higher than the ultimate sentence.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vkou</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m curious - all of this makes sense, but what was the disadvantage to buying BTC (Or Eth, or whatever) on FTX, transferring it to Coinbase, and cashing out on Coinbase?</text></comment>