What a weird story. I have limited, tangential experience with getting the FBI involved with crimes of an employee. In our case, they were not in a rush to make any moves against the person until they had an airtight case with indisputable evidence. Honestly felt strange given how obvious the crime was during the investigation.

Although in this case the seized funds were apparently returned. I have a feeling a lot of crucial details have been left out of this piece (EDIT: See links below to the investigation details. There are multiple parties involved and some of they were keenly aware that they were breaking laws that were "FBI-type stuff"). The devil’s advocate take on this outcome would be that the person cooperated with the FBI to provide evidence and/or testify against bigger fish in the case in exchange for being let off the hook. If this was the case, we’d probably see some headlines about an Amazon-related criminal charges in the coming months or years. Although in our case the released documents were full of “Company 1” and “Individual 2” anonymity, so someone (usually a journalist) would have to figure out the connection.

Or maybe this really was some big misunderstanding with disastrous consequences to the family. Impossible to know from an article from this perspective.

EDIT: There's a more in-depth review of the case here: https://www.geekwire.com/2021/former-aws-real-estate-manager...

From the summary, it does appear that multiple people are involved in the case and the person in this article (Nelson) doesn't look like the key player in the alleged frauds, though he would have played a significant role in facilitating the accusations. There's definitely some shady business going on, but this guy could have been more of a pawn than active player.

One of the text messages from transcripts is notable (Note "Nelson" is the accused person in the Medium article):

> “Flip me a couple buildings … and let me really line your pockets like we were discussing! ” Ramstetter wrote in a Dec. 17, 2018 message to Nelson, according to a copy of the exchange Amazon filed with the court.

The transcript in that article is also enlightening, because it's literally a conversation between two of the partners who acknowledge that what they're doing is "federal, FBI-type stuff" and express concern over it. If you ever get a message like that from someone proposing to "line your pockets" in exchange for facilitating deals with your employer, maybe don't work with that person any more.