A Mercer Island, Washington, man was sentenced March 5, 2026, in U.S. District Court in Seattle to two years in prison for four counts of wire fraud for taking and misusing some $35 million from his former employer.
the conviction was announced by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd.
Nevin Shetty, 42, was found guilty on November 7, 2025, following a nine-day jury trial. At the sentencing hearing Judge Tana Lin told Shetty, “The loss had significant and severe effects on the company. Your actions threw into complete turmoil the lives of those 60 people (who were laid off) …. You almost put the company out of business…. You were playing with money that wasn’t yours.”
According to records in the case, Shetty was hired as the CFO of a private software company in March 2021. The company was raising capital for its work in multiple rounds of funding. The company, with Shetty, drafted a policy governing how the money raised should be kept safe while the company worked to grow its business. The company adopted an investment policy statement that called for company cash to be invested only in money market accounts or other conservative investments. The company’s overriding objective was to preserve its capital for use in operating and growing the business, the press release from the US Attorney said.
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Even though Shetty helped draft the policy and disseminate it to the board of directors for approval, he secretly moved approximately $35 million in company funds to a cryptocurrency platform he controlled as a side business.
Shetty created that side business, called HighTower Treasury, in early 2022. It had no other outside customers. In April 2022, shortly after he was told he could not continue as CFO at his employer due to concerns about his performance, Shetty secretly transferred the funds out of his employer’s account.
Between April 1 and 12, 2022, using wire transfers he ordered from a Chase bank branch near his home, Shetty moved $35,000,100 of his employer’s money to an account for HighTower Treasury. No other executives or board members at the company knew of these transfers.
Shetty, through HighTower, then placed the money in a realm of cryptocurrency sometimes referred to as decentralized finance or “DeFi.” Shetty chose high-yield DeFi lending protocols that promised to generate returns of 20% or more.
According to prosecutors, Shetty’s idea was that HighTower would pay Shetty’s company a comparatively small, fixed amount and keep the remainder of the returns for itself. As an owner of HighTower, Shetty stood to personally share in those profits, which could have been substantial. In the first month alone, Shetty’s scheme earned roughly $133,000 of profit for himself and his HighTower business partner.
However, the cryptocurrency investments that Shetty made with the stolen funds soon began declining and by May 13, 2022, the value of the investments was nearly zero. After the $35 million was essentially gone, Shetty told two of his fellow executives what he had done. He was immediately fired.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Kopczynski asked for a nine-year prison sentence on grounds that Shetty’s “serious crime deserves stern punishment,” and that 60 people’s lives and careers were “irrevocably damaged by Shetty’s greed.”
Shetty was ordered to pay $35,000,100 and will be on supervised release for three years after prison. Judge Lin imposed a special condition that he not serve as an officer or director of a company without prior permission from the probation office.