This is what happens when your top lieutenants flip on you for plea deals and you provide the government piles of evidence by doing continuous media interviews and your attempts to disguise your fraud amount to saying "crypto" while you wave your hands.

Literally because they have found two cooperating witnesses, who have provided much of the information prosecutors need to convict Mr. SBF.

Likely the prosecution's case is strong, e.g. there is a hard-to-disguise paper trail that clearly implicates these first cooperators.

I'm going to guess plea deals.

Because there is an administration in power that is more willing to prioritize prosecuting financial crimes.

Not necessarily disuputing this, but do you have anything to back up this claim?

And the previous administration never prosecuted any financial crimes, especially not Elizabth Holmes, right?

"In June 2018, Theranos announced that Holmes was stepping down as CEO. On the same day, the Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had charged Holmes, along with Balwani, with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud." [0]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-founder-ceo-elizabe...

In 2018, Elizabeth Holmes has the misfortune of having multiple cabinet members, Presidental ally Rupert Murdoch and Republican stalwarts like Kissinger and former Senators among her defrauded investors. Other than Theranos there was little financial crime prosecution.

It is true that white collar prosecutions have declined but this is part of a long running trend (https://www.vox.com/2015/8/5/9099935/federal-white-collar-cr..., https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/514/). It is also true that the former president was on the record as against the FCPA but there were more enforcement actions in his term than most other presidents (https://www.gibsondunn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Chart2...). If there is any increase this year it's likely going to be due to a bunch of low hanging fruit PPP fraud cases.

And all the donation cheques bounced.

DOJ is alpha testing their new coin. It's based on proof-of-prosecution—all the transactions are hidden in their filings—so they need to pick up the pace.

Since everybody else is guessing, I'll guess because it's politically inconvenient for powerful people and they'd like this to be wrapped up next year and keep the investigation as quick and narrow as possible.

And why no charges for Celcius and other ponzis? Are they harder to prove fraud?

> Any ideas why these prosecutions are moving forward so fast?

Because two people near the top of the conspiracy, with broad knowledge of its details and where the supporting evidence is, have decided to fully cooperate.

And because SBF likes to talk and told his (original) lawyers to, as he tells it, “go fuck themselves” when they advised him to stop publicly confessing his crimes.

Despite the smoke and mirrors it is actually an incredibly basic crime to unravel.

In the modern era of email / slack / whatever - every smoking gun piece of evidence is a ctrl-f away. SBF is publicly testifying and pointing to where the bodies are buried, FTX the company is cooperating and co-conspirators are cooperating.

You'll be surprised how ephemeral things can be, and many more controversial white collar communication conventions develop to avoid the "on paper" evidence trail.

Half of keeping your nose clean and keeping people accountable is cornering them into reading/writing something. This is a great way to make yourself nobody's friend, but also a good weapon for halting something by refusing to do it without getting it in writing first.

Some crimes are inherently hard to prosecute. Fraud for instance requires you to prove intent. International fraud is a mine field of overlapping jurisdictions and definitions and legal systems etc.

Other crimes are very easy: misleading (prospective) investors just requires that you fail to disclose something. No need to prove intent, even something very small will do. And as long as there is at least some connection to the US, US courts will hear the case.

Prosecuting SBF for defrauding customers would take years. But getting him for failure to disclose to investors (which seems to be what they're after) is really easy. So they're powering through.

They also now have 2 co-operating witnesses.

A couple weeks ago you had people here asking why they were moving forward so slowly.

This time SBF just kinda dumped a huge bag full of evidence on the Justice department's doorstep like it was an early christmas present. The trial is going to be hilarious.