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It's November 6, 2022. You're VP Product at FTX. CoinDesk published Alameda's balance sheet two days ago — it's $14B in FTT tokens (FTX's own coin). CZ at Binance just tweeted that Binance is liquidating its FTT holdings.
Your CTO walks into your office: customer withdrawals are spiking — $6B requested in 72 hours. He shows you a Slack message from the CEO asking the eng team to "move $4B from customer wallets to Alameda's trading account, just for the weekend, we'll back it on Monday."
You have access to the wallet system.
**Framework: fiduciary duty has no override.** Customer funds are not a balance-sheet item, they are a custodial trust. The CEO's request was an order to commit fraud. The only correct call: refuse, document, report to legal counsel + auditors, then to regulators. "Just for the weekend" is the linguistic tell of every financial fraud. The CTO did, in fact, execute the transfer.
FTX filed for bankruptcy November 11, 2022. Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on 7 counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023, sentenced to 25 years in March 2024.