Islander sentenced to two years in prison for embezzling $35 million from former company

Published 10:15 am Friday, March 6, 2026

Four months after being convicted on four counts of wire fraud, Mercer Island’s Nevin Shetty received a two-year prison sentence on March 5 in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

According to First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd, Shetty, 42, took and misused some $35 million from his former employer, a start-up tech firm, reads a press release.

Shetty was hired as the CFO of a private software company in March 2021, and a previous Reporter article notes that he was indicted in court for secretly transferring the $35 million from his company’s account to invest in his own cryptocurrency operation, HighTower Treasury. The four counts regard wire transfers of $15,100,000; $14,500,000; $5,400,000; and $100 — all in April of 2022.

In May of 2023, Shetty pleaded not guilty to alleged embezzlement activities. On Nov. 7, 2025, a jury concluded a nine-day trial by returning with a unanimous guilty verdict after a nearly 10-hour deliberation. Shetty remained on bond pending sentencing, which was initially set for Feb. 11 but rescheduled to March 5.

Shetty, whose trial stemmed from an FBI investigation in 2022, was ordered to pay $35,000,100 and will be on supervised release for three years after prison, the press release reads.

“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,” Judge Tana Lin told Shetty at the sentencing hearing. She also imposed a special condition that Shetty not serve as an officer or director of a company without prior permission from the probation office.

Added Floyd: “Mr. Shetty brazenly schemed to line his own pockets with his employer’s money. Through years of pretrial litigation and then at trial, he steadfastly deflected blame and even went so far as to claim that his fraud was somehow meant to help his former company. His lies did not fool the jury.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Kopczynski asked for a nine-year prison sentence for Shetty’s serious crime, he wrote to the court. Wire fraud is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, according to a United States Department of Justice press release.

Shetty filed a host of motions related to the case and sought seven continuances of his trial date, court documents read. One motion was to suppress evidence and others were to dismiss the indictment and continue the trial date. Another of Shetty’s motions was to dismiss the entire case because he insisted that much of the indictment was “false.” The court denied the motions.

In the suppression realm, Shetty zeroed in on a government search warrant’s affidavit and noted that it was based on false and misleading facts in the wire fraud investigation, reads a previous Reporter article.