> I think the way to understand this is that the SEC is concerned about protecting unsophisticated regular folks from being scammed.
Keep in mind, the people the SEC are focused on "making whole" are the investors. The actual "unsophisticated investors" who make up the bulk of Celcius's customer base are going to get next to nothing out of the settlement. However, the sophisticated institutional investors who invested directly into Celsius will get most of their money back.
It would actually be a completely different legal case if they just said "Celcius misrepresented the security of their assets". In your Pokémon example where I am scamming people, they could bust me for fraud without having to reclassify all cards everywhere. But that's not the case they are making here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keep in mind, the people the SEC are focused on "making whole" are the investors. The actual "unsophisticated investors" who make up the bulk of Celcius's customer base are going to get next to nothing out of the settlement. However, the sophisticated institutional investors who invested directly into Celsius will get most of their money back.
It would actually be a completely different legal case if they just said "Celcius misrepresented the security of their assets". In your Pokémon example where I am scamming people, they could bust me for fraud without having to reclassify all cards everywhere. But that's not the case they are making here.