The SEC is not focused on making the "institutional investors" whole. That is happening in bankruptcy court, because Celsius declared bankruptcy, and that is how bankruptcies work: the senior creditors get their money back first. If you have problems with that, take it up with the bankruptcy court and U.S. bankruptcy laws that classify customers as junior creditors.

In fact, the SEC does not ever get involved in "making investors whole." It leaves that part up to the investors themselves.

The SEC's complaint seeks to bar Mashinsky from future involvement in crypto trading, to bar him from being an officer or director of a publicly traded company, and for the disgorgement of profits arising from maintaining the price of crypto tokens through market manipulation tactics. [https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-133]

Also, in your Pokemon example you claim that buying up Pokemon that completes your collection somehow constitutes market manipulation. But that's a thing collectors actually do...so...by definition not market manipulation but a fundamental part of the market for collectibles (and in the Pokemon hypo Pokemons have instrinsic value because they can be used and valued in a Pokemon game independently of their trading value, in addition to their trading fair market value based on their rarity as a collectible item). This is very different from what the Celsisus guy did; he used wash trading to artificially increase the price of a crypto token whose only value was in being traded.

The SEC does indeed get involved with recovering money for victims of investment fraud.

Source: me. The SEC recovered about a third of the money I unwittingly invested in a Ponzi scheme.

If you are willing to share: How did you end up getting tricked and how can other people avoid the same.

It was a pretty good scam. The scammer had a company that sold fractional profit shares in oil wells. Without getting too deep in the weeds, he sold the equivalent of more than 100%. He invested the proceeds of new investment in paying out old investors and buying new oil wells.

Eventually he ran out of new investor money and the scheme unraveled.

I don’t know how I would have caught it. The regulatory oversight in oil well finances is poor.

The guy was on the lam for a few months, then sentenced to 10 years in Federal prison. He then escaped and hasn’t been found.

Thank you. :)

> He then escaped

Is this...common?

Matt Cox talked his way out of imminent arrest, went on the run for 3 years, and was only discovered after his girlfriend slipped up and told something to the wrong person.

So yeah it happens

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cox

So...the SEC didn't try to make you whole...it recovered about a third of the money you lost to the Ponzi scheme through a disgorgement order.

The SEC can order disgorgement of profits from an investment scam (which are then returned to victims to the extent such profits are recoverable), but making victims whole for their losses is a very different thing.

No, the SEC put the org in receivership and then appointed a receiver to find where the money went.

i'm not expert, but that's the court appointing the receiver, and a receiver takes over a company but looks out for creditor's interests.

The point of the receivership was to recover the money for creditors, not investors. Investors are quite literally the last people who get a recovery from a receivership.

I'm not going to keep arguing with a non-lawyer about something I've been involved with as a lawyer, so this will be my last comment on the matter.

While you are correct in the general sense, court-ordered receiverships due to SEC enforcement action are very much about recovering investor money in a fraud situation.

https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-bulletins/ib_receiv...

When you park money with someone that neither wants to be a bank or an exchange, you get neither of those protections.

Assume all the money is gone.

Particularly when they are offering 17x the going interest rate.