Caroline Ellison, the former cryptocurrency executive and ex-girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, is now a free woman.
Ellison, 32, was officially released from the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Wednesday after about 14 months, a BOP spokesperson told Business Insider on Thursday.
BOP spokesperson Donald Murphy said Thursday that Ellison was released Wednesday from what’s known as community confinement, which means home confinement or a halfway house. As Business Insider previously reported, the ex-FTX insider was quietly moved to community confinement from a Connecticut prison in October after serving roughly 11 months of her two-year sentence.
Attorneys for Ellison declined to comment.
In December, online prison records listed Ellison’s projected release date as February 20, but that date was pushed up about a month at some point, allowing for an even earlier release.
Ellison was sentenced to two years in prison in September 2024 after she pleaded guilty to conspiring with FTX founder Bankman-Fried in an $11 billion fraud scheme. The sentence also included three years of supervised release after prison time.
She was the CEO of Alameda Research, a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried that helped FTX siphon money off of customers. Ellison was the star witness in Bankman-Fried’s 2023 criminal trial.
At her sentencing hearing, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan commended Ellison for her “very, very substantial cooperation” and her genuine remorse.
However, the judge handed down a prison sentence because of the scale of the fraud, rather than the zero time behind bars her attorneys had asked for.
“For it to be a case this serious, to be a literal get-out-of-jail-free card — I cannot see a way to it,” Kaplan said at the time.
Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges in Manhattan federal court. He is serving a 25-year sentence at a federal correctional institution in Los Angeles while appealing his conviction and sentence.
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