Four Months Max.

In the spring of 2024, the world watched as Changpeng Zhao—once the richest person in cryptocurrency, with a fortune estimated at $65 billion at its peak—received his sentence for helping to facilitate what prosecutors called one of the largest money laundering operations in history. The sentence? Four months.

Four months. 120 days. For overseeing a platform that processed over $4 trillion in transactions while allegedly turning a blind eye to sanctions evasion, terrorist financing, and criminal money flows. The fine was substantial—$50 million personally, $4.3 billion for the company—but the time? A single season.

This is not an anomaly. This is a pattern. And this website exists to document it.

There exists in American jurisprudence an unwritten formula, a shadow algorithm that converts dollars into days. The more you have—or had—the less you serve. The relationship is not linear; it is exponential, asymptotic, approaching but never quite reaching zero.

Consider the numbers. Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted of orchestrating an $8 billion fraud that evaporated customer funds and crashed an entire ecosystem, received 25 years. A harsh sentence, certainly. But break it down: roughly 3 years per billion dollars stolen. If you or I were to steal $8,000 from our employer, we might expect similar treatment. Scale up by a factor of a million, and somehow the math... shifts.

Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder who pled guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations while his platform facilitated billions in potentially illicit transactions? Six months of home detention. Not prison. Home. Where presumably the WiFi worked and the coffee was good.

Ben Delo, his co-founder? Thirty months of probation. No incarceration at all.

The pattern reveals itself not through any single case, but through the aggregate, the constellation of outcomes that together trace an invisible line: the more you have, the less you lose.

We chose this name not because four months is literally the maximum sentence any crypto executive has received—it is not—but because it captures something essential about the phenomenon we are observing.

Four months is long enough to feel like punishment, short enough to be survivable. It is a sentence that allows for redemption narratives, comeback stories, podcast appearances about “lessons learned.” It is a sentence that says “we take this seriously” while whispering “but not that seriously.”

Four Months Max is a state of mind. It is the ceiling, the cap, the invisible barrier that seems to exist between the ultra-wealthy and real accountability. It is the amount of time that separates a “serious consequence” from a “minor inconvenience.”

When CZ received his four-month sentence, something crystallized. This was not an outlier—it was a benchmark. A Schelling point for the justice system when dealing with the crypto elite.

It would be easy—perhaps too easy—to cry corruption. To imagine smoke-filled rooms where prosecutors and defense attorneys negotiate outcomes over expensive wine. But the truth is likely more mundane and more troubling.

The system does not need corruption to produce these outcomes. It just needs to work as designed.

A defendant with resources can hire the best lawyers, the most persuasive experts, the most thorough investigators. They can fund exhaustive appeals. They can negotiate from positions of strength, offering cooperation, restitution, plea deals that make prosecutors' jobs easier and conviction rates higher.

A defendant with resources can afford to wait, to delay, to exploit every procedural mechanism available. Time, for them, is a weapon. For an overworked prosecutor with a hundred other cases, a quick plea deal—even one with a light sentence—might seem like a victory.

The system works exactly as designed. It is just that the design was never intended to handle this kind of scale, this kind of wealth, this kind of transgression.

This is satire. We want to be absolutely clear about that. The name “Four Months Max” is deliberately provocative, designed to make you think, to make you uncomfortable, perhaps even to make you laugh at the absurdity of it all.

This is not a hit piece. We do not have personal vendettas against anyone listed here. We are not funded by competitors, enemies, or short-sellers. We are just observers, documenting patterns that emerge from public records.

This is not legal scholarship. We are not lawyers, and nothing here should be construed as legal analysis or advice. Legal outcomes are complex, influenced by factors far beyond what we can capture in database entries.

This is not journalism. We aggregate and organize publicly available information. We do not break stories or conduct investigations. Every claim here should be verified against the primary sources we link to.

What this is: A mirror. A data visualization. A prompt for conversation. A slightly sardonic catalog of outcomes that, when viewed together, might make you wonder if the scales of justice need recalibration.

In fairness—and we do try to be fair—there is another way to read these numbers.

The crypto space is young. Legal frameworks are still being developed. Prosecutors are still learning how to handle cases involving digital assets, decentralized systems, and global jurisdictional tangles. Early cases often result in lighter sentences as precedents are established.

Many of these individuals have cooperated extensively with authorities. Cooperation, in the American system, is rewarded—and perhaps it should be, given how much it can help unravel complex criminal networks.

Some defendants, like the BitMEX founders, faced charges that were genuinely novel—regulatory violations that had never been prosecuted at this scale before. The sentences reflected uncertainty about how to categorize and punish such conduct.

And not everyone gets off lightly. Ross Ulbricht received life in prison—two life sentences plus forty years, no possibility of parole—for running Silk Road. (Though he was recently pardoned, which is its own commentary on the randomness of outcomes.)

We acknowledge all of this. We just also notice the pattern.

At its core, Four Months Max exists to ask questions that do not have easy answers:

• When a crime affects millions of victims across dozens of countries, how do you even begin to calculate appropriate punishment?
• Is there a point at which financial crime becomes so large that traditional sentencing frameworks simply break down?
• Should we be satisfied with large fines as a substitute for incarceration, given that many defendants can pay them without meaningfully impacting their lifestyle?
• What does justice look like when the perpetrator is more financially comfortable in prison than most of their victims will ever be outside of it?
• And perhaps most fundamentally: Is the criminal justice system even the right tool for addressing harms at this scale?

We do not have answers. We have data, and we have questions.

Legal situations change. Appeals succeed. Pardons are granted. New charges are filed. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow.

We try to keep this database current, but we are not a 24/7 news operation. If you notice something outdated or incorrect, please help us fix it. Every entry includes sources; verify before you cite.

We operate on a simple principle: when in doubt, check the source. When sources conflict, we try to note the uncertainty. When we do not know something, we say so.

So here it is. Four Months Max. A collection of names, dates, charges, and outcomes. A pattern that may or may not prove anything, depending on your priors and your patience.

Browse it. Search it. Filter it. Draw your own conclusions.

Maybe you will see what we see: a system struggling to handle a new category of crime, producing outcomes that seem calibrated for a different era of different stakes.

Or maybe you will see something else entirely. That is fine too. We are not here to tell you what to think. We are just here to make sure you have the information to think with.

Welcome to Four Months Max. Time served: varies.