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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

> That’s a really light sentence for someone who defrauded people out of billions

I don't excuse anything that she did, but didn't 98% of investors get everything back with interest?

Investors? No. Customers? They were paid the cash value of their crypto holdings at the time of bankruptcy. Thanks to a massive bull run in crypto between bankruptcy and payout, customers were able to be paid back in “full” even with the fraud. However, when BTC is sitting at $60k and your missing BTC is being paid back at $17k, you’re not exactly going to be feeling giddy.

And that price at the time of the bankruptcy was artificially deflated by FTX dumping customer assets to try to cover up their fraud.

They did, but not through any virtue or skill on her part. That was just the plain luck of Bitcoin happening to go way way up before the bankruptcy estate paid out using what it had, and the court that sentenced her couldn't know that would happen and if it somehow had, should not have taken it into account. You wouldn't advocate a lighter sentence for murder if the bullet had miraculously been struck by lightning on its way to the target's skull and thereby missed.

Well, actually you would, because that would change it from murder to attempted murder.

The customers were not fully repaid, except in an artificial accounting sense using post-crash marks. Nevertheless, the recovery was far more successful than most people expected at the time.

Only by accident of BTC's appreciation while the fraud+bankruptcy were underway. Not sure that should be a mitigating factor.

Maybe, on paper, some day in the indeterminate future, and likely without interest.

For comparison, MtGox went tits up twelve years ago in 2014 and they're still figuring out repayments for its BTC holders, which is both a hell of a lot simpler than FTX's grab bag of own tokens etc and has gone up a zillion percent since 2014.

Smaller depositors (<$50k) got back 118% of the dollar value of their holdings at the time of the bankruptcy. I was one of those and got paid out a few months ago. The larger depositors and investors were still haggling in court last time I checked over who gets what.

Criminal law deals with intent not with outcomes.

Hence why "attempted murder" is a thing.

I wanna say that was the FTX story, not Alameda.

It was all one company in the end, through co-mingling and lack of controls.

they got back 100% at a lower price, around 20k per btc I think.

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