In this case[0] the CEO (Chris Kirchner) stole ~20M$ from the company causing employees to go unpaid for months, and outside of California all they got was owed wages (no interest or anything). While mentioned in the article, what he was mainly convicted of was defrauding investors rather than stealing from employees.

> Apparently, projecting personal prosperity was more important to him than making payroll

He actually had the temerity early on in the debacle when he was still pretending there was money to tell us that they had decided to not pay us that week because it would be bad for the companies investments to withdraw funds then.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/slync-founder-sentenced...