SEC v. Caroline Ellison and Zixiao "Gary" Wang (price manipulation, 2022)

Settled

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In December 2022 the SEC charged Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, and Zixiao Wang, former FTX CTO, in the Southern District of New York with defrauding FTX equity investors, including by propping up the price of the FTT token with large open-market purchases. In December 2025 the SEC filed proposed final consent judgments, subject to court approval, with five-year conduct-based injunctions and officer-and-director bars of 10 years for Ellison and eight for Wang; money remedies were not stated.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

the Securities and Exchange Commission filed this matter on December 21, 2022 in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (No. 1:22-cv-10794); the initial release is dated January 19, 2023 (release LR-25617). The respondents named are Caroline Ellison, former CEO of Alameda Research, and Zixiao "Gary" Wang, former Chief Technology Officer of FTX Trading Ltd.

The complaint alleges that between 2019 and 2022, Ellison, at Samuel Bankman-Fried's direction, manipulated the price of FTT, an FTX-issued exchange crypto security token, by purchasing large quantities on the open market to prop up its price. FTT served as collateral for undisclosed loans of FTX customer assets to Alameda, a crypto hedge fund owned by Wang and Bankman-Fried and run by Ellison; by manipulating FTT's price, the complaint alleges, Bankman-Fried and Ellison inflated the valuation of Alameda's FTT holdings, overstating the value of collateral on Alameda's balance sheet and misleading investors about FTX's risk exposure. The complaint separately alleges that Ellison and Wang were active participants in a broader scheme, with Wang having written the FTX software code that allowed Alameda to divert FTX customer funds and Ellison having used those misappropriated funds for Alameda's trading.

This library tags the matter as price manipulation, based on the FTT-support-buying conduct the regulator describes. The tagging is ours, not the regulator's: the SEC's complaint itself charges violations of Securities Act Section 17(a)(1) and (3) and Exchange Act Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5(a) and (c).

The conduct is recorded against crypto.

Ellison and Wang, without denying the SEC's allegations, consented to final judgments entered in December 2025: permanent injunctions against violating the antifraud provisions, five-year conduct-based injunctions, and officer-and-director bars (ten years for Ellison, eight for Wang). The amount of any disgorgement, prejudgment interest or civil penalty was left for the court to determine on a later SEC motion and no figure is recorded here. The release references parallel criminal proceedings brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York against both defendants; where a criminal case exists, the civil and criminal outcomes are recorded separately, because they resolve on different standards of proof.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary documents linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the releases.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Price manipulation — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2022-12-21 Complaint filed (S.D.N.Y., No. 1:22-cv-10794)
2. 2023-01-19 SEC litigation release published
3. 2025-12-19 SEC files proposed final consent judgments

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• SEC litigation release (complaint)
• SEC litigation release (final consent judgments)

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added October 1, 2026. submit a correction.