A federal judge in Seattle handed down a two-year prison sentence to Nevin Shetty, a 42-year-old former chief financial officer who drained $35 million from his startup employer and poured every dollar into high-risk decentralized finance bets. The money was gone in weeks. Sixty people lost their jobs because of it.
Shetty had joined the private Seattle-area software company as CFO in March 2021. He helped write the very investment policy he would go on to violate, one that required company cash to sit only in money market accounts or equally conservative instruments. The board approved it. Shetty signed off on it.
The Secret Transfers Nobody Saw Coming
When performance concerns pushed him out of the CFO seat in early April 2022, Shetty moved fast. Between April 1 and 12 of that year, he wired $35,000,100 out of the company’s account through a Chase branch near his Mercer Island home. The destination was HighTower Treasury, a crypto platform he had quietly built himself just months earlier. No board member knew. No other executive had any idea.
HighTower had no outside customers. It existed, for all practical purposes, to take this money. Shetty funneled the funds into DeFi lending protocols promising returns north of 20%. His plan was for HighTower to pay the company a fixed, modest return and pocket the rest. In the first month alone, Shetty and his business partner at HighTower pulled roughly $133,000 in profit from the scheme.
Then the crypto markets moved against him.
$35 Million Reduced to Nearly Nothing
By May 13, 2022, the investments had collapsed to almost zero. About six weeks. That is all it took to wipe out $35 million that was supposed to fund a company’s growth. Shetty then told two executives what he had done. He was fired the same day.
The fallout forced the company to lay off 60 employees. Judge Tana Lin addressed Shetty directly at sentencing:
“The loss had significant and severe effects on the company. Your actions threw into complete turmoil the lives of those 60 people. You almost put the company out of business. You were playing with money that wasn’t yours.”
Prosecutors had pushed for nine years. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd, in describing the outcome, said Shetty had spent the entire legal fight deflecting responsibility, at one point even claiming the fraud was intended to benefit the company.
“Mr. Shetty brazenly schemed to line his own pockets with his employer’s money,” Floyd said. “His lies did not fool the jury.”
Jonathan Dean, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Seattle field office, put the scale plainly:
“In less than one month, Mr. Shetty stole $35 million from his employer that he knew was meant to be kept in conservative investments. Instead, he lost almost all of it through risky cryptocurrency investments.”
Conviction, Restitution, and What Comes Next
A jury had found Shetty guilty on four counts of wire fraud following a nine-day trial in November 2025. Beyond the two-year sentence, he must repay the full $35,000,100 and will serve three years of supervised release. Judge Lin also barred him from serving as an officer or director of any company without probation office approval.
The CFO wire fraud case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Philip Kopczynski and Grace Zoller.
