How hard is it likely to be, realistically, to figure out who got this money? That is way, way too big a windfall to effectively hide. Even getting rid of it would take an enormous amount of work, if you didn't want it.
This is like with lottery winners - anonymity won't necessarily protect you. I'm not sure this encourages me to be a whistleblower... it would create so many more stressors after what was already a phenomenally stressful time. $10m or so would be easier to hide.
I don't think the issue will be hiding that you have the money. That's almost trivial. The person next to you on the bus could have a huge amount of money but until they start spending, you have no way of knowing.
However, given the size of the payment, it must be possible to work out what enforcement this award is related to. Once that is established, the court documents should reveal the potential whistleblower's identity.
This award has to be for something against a large financial firm, a $279M award is based on a % of the damage in some way I believe. The person likely had to be intimately familiar with whatever was reported so they are highly likely to know the ins and outs of dealing with large numbers of digits of money and financial products/solutions beyond what retail/layperson would be aware of. I think they might have ideas on what they would want to do with the money and/or already be financially well off that buying more things doesn't really make large life impacts anymore (i.e well into 6 digit earnings territory). I think its likely if they wanted this to not be publicly known its entirely plausible they could do that.
Unless it is a low paid janitorial engineer that was reading the trash.
What if they threatened your family? Your kids? What if you had to move to another state or another country? Could you ever have normal friends again? Move around the world without a bodyguard and bulletproof windows?
Large sums of money don't give you security in your current lifestyle. They completely and totally change your existence in permanent and often negative ways.
OTOH, it is generally the case that the outcome is unpredictable and we like to tell the stories where it is destructive even if in the average case it is overall beneficial.
300 million easily pays for literally and metaphorically bulletproof security indefinitely. What security-related lifestyle changes couldn’t be overcome with this sum of money?
On a different note, the lottery typically ruins people’s lives. There’s even a TV show about it. People just can’t adjust to that kind of change in wealth. I think this would be no different.
"Overcome" in the sense of "you'll stay alive and still have a lot of money," not in the sense of "you'll get to keep the lifestyle you had before, just with more money." Your anonymity is gone forever.
What would happen with 100m that wouldn't happen with 10m? Seems like all of the same processes, traps and threats would exist for both, or at least 90% overlap.
Is this maybe connected to the Sam Bankman Fried case? FTX, Alameda Research and the sorts. Apparently the one of their execs switched sides, forgot her name
Exceedingly unlikely. Cutting a deal and agreeing to testify for the criminal prosecution after you’ve been caught doesn’t make you a whistleblower. It’s also way too early. The FTX enforcement actions are only just getting underway.
SEC whistleblower awards range from 10 to 30 percent of fines collected, so presumably this was in exchange for information about a case that led to collections somewhere in between the range of $920 million to $2.79 billion. Assuming the SEC has already published the successful prosecution of the underlying case, you can probably figure out which one it was. And I bet the total was a nice even multiple of 2.79.
Requires a successful prosecution so probably past tense. My guess is wall street in general.. 16 firms paid 1.1 billion a couple years ago collectively. But it could be someone else.. the SEC took in 6.4 billion in penalties last year.
The crypto ones are going to be off the hook if there are any whistleblowers that outed them.
Grotesque? The fund that pays these things out is getting way more than that back from this whistleblower's help (in fines, etc. paid out by the criminals).
Oh yea, I'm a troll because we disagree; that maybe I believe funds should be dispersed to victims of crime... Maybe it is time to grow up instead of living in an echo chamber of adolescent group-think.
This is like with lottery winners - anonymity won't necessarily protect you. I'm not sure this encourages me to be a whistleblower... it would create so many more stressors after what was already a phenomenally stressful time. $10m or so would be easier to hide.