And thus do we have another piece of evidence for why morals and ethics matter, even for software developers. I doubt they'll end up with liability, but I do hope they at least recognize and think about how their actions enabled this whole mess.
When you should know it's criminal, "just following orders" isn't a great defense.
> but I do hope they at least recognize and think about how their actions enabled this whole mess.
They should get lawyers. And be prepared to sing like canaries.
That's even true in the military if you're given illegal orders. It's called the "duty to disobey".
It's not enough that employees "should" know what's illegal and what's not in an exchange -- companies need to be held criminally negligent for employing people who don't know.
But that's why software "engineers" have quotes around "engineer"
If my boss came to me and said, “continue showing customer funds sent to our “sister” investment company in the staff dashboards” I wouldn’t find that suspicious. I would probably push back and say that might be confusing unless we separate out that amount and rename the total to something that denotes part of this value is with our sister company. But I would assume design incompetence and not fraud.
But then again if I was just one of a handful of devs that worked with the company I would probably find it suspicious, as I would confidently know that nowhere else in the codebase do we support a close integration with our sister investment company and should therefore know we shouldn’t treat them any differently.
Also the modification to exempt the investment company from risk rules does seem suspicious, unless again you believed there was an integration somewhere and believed investment risk mitigation rules were handled on the other platform or something.
Singh is going to jail. He was an executive, not just a low-level employee, and was a pre-collapse billionaire. I have no doubt the evidence like this will show that he knew what he was doing was willingly fraudulent. Madoff's programmers each got 2 1/2 years.
It sounds like there's plenty of other evidence, but allowing a 'negative balance' hardly sounds like a smoking gun.
A negative balance is often how credit is displayed.
>Since Alameda didn't have the funds to meet these requests, Bankman-Fried directed Alameda to tap its "line of credit" with FTX to obtain billions of dollars in financing, the complaint said
The article actually says as much. Now as Chief Engineer it's possible he was aware it was a scam, but it's also possible he was just told they have an arrangement with Alameda that allows them to maintain a credit line.
I doubt that. If they haven’t been sued already, they will tomorrow.
They're each going to run up five, maybe six, figure legal bills.
These guys are going to spend a good bit more than that.