Former Wall Street trader and FTX employee sues collapsed crypto exchange for bonus

A former Wall Street trader recruited by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to aid the cryptocurrency exchange’s charitable giving arm filed a lawsuit on Monday, fighting to get the rest of his six-figure 2022 bonus from the bankrupt company that defrauded $8 billion from unsuspecting customers.

Ross Rheingans-Yoo claimed in court that FTX owes him another $275,000 — after the firm paid him $375,000 about two months before the crypto exchange imploded in November 2022 and its top lieutenants were arrested, charged with fraud, and dragged to court. He began working with the exchange 11 months before its collapse.

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Rheingans-Yoo denied claims brought against him by FTX’s new management that he knowingly helped Bankman-Fried carry out one of the biggest financial cons in recent history.

“I was not part of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle who knew about and facilitated the misappropriation of FTX customer funds,” Rheingans-Yoo said in a sworn statement. “I had no knowledge of Bankman-Fried’s fraud. I did not aid and abet his breach of fiduciary duty to the Debtors.”

Rheingans-Yoo’s dispute is tied to a larger effort by FTX’s bankruptcy advisers to claw back $71.5 million that were tangled in customer and corporate funds and taken by FTX Foundation and Latona Bioscience Group, a nonprofit company Rheingans-Yoo led, Bloomberg reported.

Bankman-Fried recruited Rheingans-Yoo in 2022 to oversee a charitable-giving affiliate of FTX. His employment terms and contract were hashed out in a Google Doc, which stated that Rheingans-Yoo would become the program officer of FTX Foundation, which would involve leading Latona Bioscience. Rheingans-Yoo’s new job came with a base salary of $100,000, according to court documents. In July, FTX bankruptcy advisers claimed Latona was a “sham” nonprofit company and made donations to companies for Bankman-Fried’s “personal aggrandizement.”

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A New York jury on Nov. 2 found Bankman-Fried guilty of seven federal charges, including wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering, connected to the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund he owned.

Most of the people in Bankman-Fried’s inner circle made deals with prosecutors and testified against the onetime crypto wunderkind. He will be sentenced next year and could spend the rest of his life behind bars.