The Securities and Exchange Commission's Salt Lake City office – notorious in the crypto world for its failed fraud lawsuit against DEBT Box – will shut down after seeing "significant attrition" among its staff, some of whom were pushed out over the case.

SEC lawyers Michael Welsh and Joseph Watkins resigned in April after a federal judge sanctioned them for committing a "gross abuse of power" in seeking to freeze the assets of Utah-based crypto company DEBT Box on misleading grounds. Just last week the judge dismissed that case and ordered the SEC to pay DEBT Box $1.8 million in legal fees.

"The agency considered its budget and organizational efficiency in deciding to close the office, and it has no plans to close any other regional offices," said a press release.

The regulator's Denver office will take over any enforcement jurisdiction, the SEC said.

Regulations SEC Debt Box

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.