New York Attorney General Letitia James has barred Alex Mashinsky from the securities, commodities, and crypto industries for life and attached a $35 million penalty that New York only collects if the former Celsius Network chief breaks the federal deal that already put him in prison.
James sued Mashinsky in 2023 over claims he misled hundreds of thousands of depositors, including more than 26,000 New Yorkers, about how safe their money was on the crypto lender. Per the attorney general’s office, the $35 million figure splits into two conditional payments. The first condition is that if Mashinsky fails to forfeit $10 million in ill-gotten gains to the federal government, on top of assets already surrendered, he will owe the state $25 million. The other $10 million that brings the total to $35 million only comes into play if Mashinsky does not serve his full prison term.
New York sets $35M penalty condition in Mashinsky’s case
Mashinsky’s federal plea already has a forfeiture order of $48,393,446, per the court stipulation filed in the case. If he forfeits that amount and completes his sentence, nothing goes to New York. So, for the state to receive any of that penalty, Mashinsky would have to default on commitments he made to avoid a longer sentence. New York is not the only state/body that has slammed Mashinsky with a form of restriction.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) entered a suspended $4.7 billion judgment and required Mashinsky to pay $10 million as part of the settlement. It then imposed an 18-year reporting regime while cutting him off from crypto and financial services. In June, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) added permanent trading and registration bans through a court consent order. Mashinsky is serving 144 months in jail, a 12-year sentence that was handed down in May 2025 after he pleaded guilty to commodities fraud and manipulating the price of Celsius’s CEL token.
Mashinsky’s book with regulators is not yet fully closed, as the lawsuit that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed against him in July 2023 over an alleged unregistered securities offering and CEL price manipulation is still reportedly open. The agency told a federal court it had “engaged in substantive settlement discussions” with him in late May, with no agreement reached and the court granting another 60 days to keep talking.
Mashinsky may be facing another lifetime ban if the SEC settles on the same terms as the other agencies. The events that led to the series of rulings and lifetime bans started in June 2022 after Celsius froze withdrawals on its platform. A month later, it filed for Chapter 11, wiping out deposits made by users who were treating it as a savings account. Since then, creditors have received more than $3.4 billion through the bankruptcy proceeding as of August 2026. James said in a statement, “I will not allow scammers to use cryptocurrencies to prey on unsuspecting New Yorkers.”
