Onetime cryptocurrency mogul Do Kwon was sentenced Thursday to 15 years in prison after a $40 billion crash revealed his crypto ecosystem to be a fraud. Victims said the 34-year-old financial technology whiz weaponized their trust to convince them that the investment — secretly propped up by cash infusions — was safe.

Kwon, a Stanford graduate known by some as “the cryptocurrency king,” apologized after listening as victims — one in court and others by telephone — described the scam’s toll: wiping out nest eggs, depleting charities and wrecking lives. One told the judge in a letter that he contemplated suicide after his father lost his retirement money in the scheme.

Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said at a daylong sentencing hearing in Manhattan federal court that the government’s recommendation of 12 years in prison was “unreasonably lenient” and that the defense’s request for five years was “utterly unthinkable and wildly unreasonable.” Kwon faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

“Your offense caused real people to lose $40 billion in real money, not some paper loss,” Engelmayer told Kwon, who sat at the defense table in a yellow jail suit. The judge called it “a fraud on an epic, generational scale” and said Kwon had an “almost mystical hold” on investors and caused incalculable “human wreckage.”

Kwon pleaded guilty in August to fraud charges stemming from the collapse of Terraform Labs, the Singapore-based firm he co-founded in 2018. The loss exceeded the combined losses from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood’s frauds, prosecutors said. Engelmayer estimated there may have been a million victims.

Terraform Labs had touted its TerraUSD as a reliable “stablecoin” — a kind of currency typically pegged to stable assets to prevent drastic fluctuations in prices. But prosecutors say it was an illusion backed by outside cash infusions that came crumbling down after it plunged far below its $1 peg. The crash devastated investors in TerraUSD and its floating sister currency, Luna, triggering “a cascade of crises that swept through cryptocurrency markets.”

Kwon tried to rebuild Terraform Labs in Singapore before fleeing to the Balkans on a false passport, prosecutors said. He’s been locked up since his March 2023 arrest in Montenegro. He was credited for 17 months he spent in jail there before being extradited to the U.S.

Kwon agreed to forfeit over $19 million as part of his plea deal. His lawyers argued his conduct stemmed not from greed, but hubris and desperation. Engelmayer rejected his request to serve his sentence in his native South Korea, where he also faces prosecution and where his wife and 4-year-old daughter live.

“I have spent almost every waking moment of the last few years thinking of what I could have done different and what I can do now to make things right,” Kwon told Engelmayer. Hearing from victims, he said, was “harrowing and reminded me again of the great losses that I have caused.”

One victim, speaking by telephone, said his wife divorced him, his sons had to skip college, and he had to move back to Croatia to live with his parents after TerraUSD’s crash evaporated his family’s life savings. Another said he has to “live with the guilt” of persuading his in-laws and hundreds of nonprofit organizations to invest.

Stanislav Trofimchuk said his family’s investment plummeted from $190,000 to $13,000 — “17 years of our life, gone” during what he described as “two weeks of sheer terror.”

Chauncey St. John, speaking in court, said some nonprofits he worked with lost more than $2 million and a church group lost about $900,000. He and his wife are saddled with debt and his in-laws have been forced to work well past their planned retirement, he said.

Nevertheless, St. John said, he forgives Kwon and “I pray to God to have mercy on his soul.”

A prosecutor read excerpts from some of more than 300 letters submitted by victims, including a person identified only by initials who lost nearly $11,400 while juggling bills and trying to complete college. Kwon had made Terra seem like a safe place to stash savings, the person said.

“To some that is just a number on a page, but to me it was years of effort,” the person wrote. “Watching it evaporate, literally overnight, was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.”

“What happened was not an accident. It was not a market event. It was deception,” the person added, imploring the judge to “consider the human cost of this tragedy.”

Kwon created an “illusion of resilience while covering up systemic failure,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Mortazavi told Engelmayer. “This was fraud executed with arrogance, manipulation and total disregard for people.”

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to end its monthslong deployment of National Guard troops to help police the nation’s capital.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb concluded that President Donald Trump’s military takeover in Washington, D.C., illegally intrudes on local officials’ authority to direct law enforcement in the district. She put her order on hold for 21 days to allow for an appeal, however.

District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued to challenge the Guard deployments. He asked the judge to bar the White House from deploying Guard troops without the mayor’s consent while the lawsuit plays out.

Dozens of states took sides in Schwalb’s lawsuit, with their support falling along party lines.

Cobb found that while the president does have authority to protect federal functioning and property, he can’t unilaterally deploy the D.C. National Guard to help with crime control as he sees fit or call in troops from other states.

After her ruling, Schwalb called for troops to be sent home. “Normalizing the use of military troops for domestic law enforcement sets a dangerous precedent, where the President can disregard states’ independence and deploy troops wherever and whenever he wants — with no check on his military power,” Schwalb said.

The White House, though, stood by the deployment.

“President Trump is well within his lawful authority to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., to protect federal assets and assist law enforcement with specific tasks,” said spokeswoman Abigail Jackson. “This lawsuit is nothing more than another attempt — at the detriment of DC residents — to undermine the President’s highly successful operations to stop violent crime in DC.”

In August, President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in Washington. Within a month, more than 2,300 National Guard troops from eight states and the district were patrolling the city under the command of the Secretary of the Army. Trump also deployed hundreds of federal agents to assist in patrols.

The administration has also deployed Guard troops to Los Angeles and tried to send troops into Chicago and Portland, Oregon, prompting other court challenges. A federal appeals court allowed the Los Angeles deployment, and the administration is appealing a judge’s decision in Portland that found the president did not have the authority to call up or deploy National Guard troops there.

The Supreme Court is weighing the administration’s emergency appeal to be allowed to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area in support of an immigration crackdown. A lower court has indefinitely prevented the deployment.

In Washington, It’s unclear how long the deployments will last, but attorneys from Schwalb’s office said Guard troops are likely to remain in the city through at least next summer.

A bill that would allow judges to sentence women who get abortions to decades in prison and could restrict the use of IUDs and in vitro fertilization goes before a small group of South Carolina senators Tuesday.

This would be the first of at least a half-dozen legislative steps for the proposal that includes the strictest abortion prohibitions and punishments in the nation.

The subcommittee of the state Senate’s Medical Affairs Committee can change it Tuesday afternoon and even if it’s approved, its prospects are doubtful at best.

But even at this stage, the bill has gone further than any other such proposal across the U.S. since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, opening the door for states to implement abortion bans.

The proposal would ban all abortions unless the woman’s life is threatened. Current state law bans abortions after cardiac activity is detected, which is typically six week into a pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant. Current law also allows abortions for rape and incest victims up to 12 weeks.

The proposal would also do things that aren’t being done in any other state. Women who get an abortion and anyone who helps them could face up to 30 years in prison. It appears to ban any contraception that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting, which would ban intrauterine devices and could limit in vitro fertilization.

Providing information about abortions would be illegal, leaving doctors worried they couldn’t suggest places where the procedure is legal.

Republican Sen. Richard Cash, who sponsors the bill and is one of the Senate’s most strident voices against abortion, will run Tuesday’s subcommittee. He acknowledged problems last month with potentially banning contraception and restricting the advice doctors can give to patients. But he has given no indication what changes he or the rest of the subcommittee might support. Six of the nine members are Republicans.

Abortion remains an unsettled issue in conservative states and how much more to restrict it is fracturing anti-abortion groups.
South Carolina Citizens for Life, one of the state’s largest and oldest opponents of abortion, issued a statement last month saying it can’t support Cash’s bill because women who get abortions are victims too and shouldn’t be punished.

On the other side, at least for this bill, are groups like Equal Protection South Carolina. “Abortion is murder and should be treated as such,” founder Mark Corral said.