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A former Wells Fargo Bank executive accused of overseeing a ruse that created millions of bogus customer accounts has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges likely to send her prison for her role in the scandal, the Associated Press reported. The agreement filed on Wednesday in a Los Angeles federal court calls for the former Wells Fargo executive, Carrie Tolstedt, to serve a 16-month prison sentence for obstructing regulators’ investigation into abusive sales practices that culminated in the bank paying billions of dollars in fines. Tolstedt, 63, also agreed to pay a $17 million fine in a separate civil settlement with the government that also bans her from working again in the banking industry. Prosecutors are requesting an April 7 court hearing to review the plea agreement. Tolstedt was the longtime head of the Wells Fargo division responsible for its sprawling network of retail branches, before leaving in 2016 just before evidence of the bank’s abusive sales tactics surfaced. After previously denying any wrongdoing, Tolstedt becomes the first Wells Fargo executive to be held criminally culpable for a scandal that resulted in the firing of 5,300 employees for falsifying bank records and other ethics violations.

A business tycoon long sought by the government of China and known for cultivating ties to Trump administration figures including Steve Bannon was arrested Wednesday in New York on charges that he oversaw a $1 billion fraud conspiracy, the Associated Press reported. Guo Wengui and his financier, Kin Ming Je, faced an indictment in federal court in Manhattan charging them with various crimes, including wire, securities and bank fraud. Guo was charged in court papers under the name Ho Wan Kwok. U.S. prosecutors said the indictment stemmed from a complex scheme in which Guo lied to hundreds of thousands of online followers in the United States and around the world before misappropriating hundreds of millions of dollars. Kin Ming Je has not been arrested. Guo was expected to appear in court Wednesday. The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, said in a release that Guo was charged with “lining his pockets with the money he stole, including buying himself, and his close relatives, a 50,000 square foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and even two $36,000 mattresses, and financing a $37 million luxury yacht.”

Decentralized lending protocol Euler Finance was hit by an attack that drained $197 million in cryptocurrencies from its platform on Monday, making it the largest hack in its corner of the digital-assets market this year, Bloomberg News reported. The bulk of the hacker’s loot — worth roughly $135 million — was denominated in staked Ether tokens (stETH), while the remainder was held in wrapped Bitcoin and stablecoins DAI and USDC, according to security firm BlockSec. Some of the proceeds from the attack are already being laundered through Tornado Cash, a U.S.-sanctioned platform which enables users to obfuscate their transaction history, security companies PeckShield Inc and Elliptic said. The incident on Monday morning in London has almost wiped out Euler’s on-chain value, leaving only around $9.7 million locked on the platform, data from DeFiLlama show. Euler Finance allows users to lend and borrow large amounts of cryptoassets through an automated service that does not require human intervention. The protocol’s EUL token fell more than 50% to a low of $2.88 after the attack was disclosed, according to pricing data from CoinGecko.

Zamir Siddiqi, a Los Angeles-based investment advisor, was sentenced to prison Thursday for false statements made in his Dec. 9, 2013, chapter 7 bankruptcy case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California reported. Siddiqi’s case had been discharged on Sept. 16, 2014, but on Nov. 25 of that year, the chapter 7 trustee filed a complaint stating that when Siddiqi filed amendments to his schedules, he did not disclose his interest in Lagoon CCP, LLC or the proceeds he had obtained on or after Dec. 13, 2013, from selling that interest. On Feb. 10, 2020, Siddiqi pleaded guilty to one count of false statement in a bankruptcy under 18 U.S.C. § 152(2) for failing to disclose his interest in the LLC. On March 9, the court sentenced Siddiqi to 18 months imprisonment, followed by two years of supervised release, $100 special assessment and $336,373.77 in restitution. Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Schwab of the Major Frauds section handled the sentencing in this case.

Nishad Singh followed Sam Bankman-Fried into the high-stakes world of cryptocurrency trading. Now he could help put the former FTX chief executive in prison, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Singh, the 27-year-old former director of engineering at FTX, pleaded guilty this week to six criminal counts, including wire fraud. He agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation of FTX’s collapse. The deal means Mr. Singh could end up testifying against a colleague and friend whom he has known since childhood. Just a few months ago, he and Mr. Bankman-Fried were housemates in the Bahamas, living in a luxury penthouse with other executives at FTX and its sister trading firm, Alameda Research. “I’m unbelievably sorry for my role in all of this and the harm that it has caused,” Singh said in a court hearing in Manhattan on Tuesday. Singh attended the same elite Silicon Valley prep school as Bankman-Fried and was close friends with his younger brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried. Like the Bankman-Fried brothers and several other top FTX executives, Singh was a proponent of effective altruism, a movement that urges adherents to make big bucks so they can give their fortune to charity.

As a third member of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle became a prosecution witness, lawyers for the FTX co-founder were preparing for a more immediate fight: his use of the internet and mobile apps while out on bail, Bloomberg News reported. Bankman-Fried now faces the culmination of a tense standoff with the judge in his criminal fraud case over his communications. Free on a $250 million bond but confined to his parents’ house with a monitoring device around his ankle, he has already angered U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan by using encrypted-messaging apps and a virtual private network, or VPN, which hides a computer’s identity. “Why am I being asked to set him loose in this garden of electronic devices?” Judge Kaplan demanded at the most recent bail hearing in lower Manhattan, on Feb. 16. For now he has barred Bankman-Fried from using either of those tools and from contacting former or current FTX employees. Late Wednesday, in response to a court order, the two sides jointly proposed a pair of technology consultants to advise the skeptical judge on a raft of restrictions that balances the defendant’s rights and needs with the integrity of the judicial process. Kaplan has threatened to revoke the bail package altogether and send Bankman-Fried to jail ahead of his October trial if he isn’t satisfied with the constraints.