The founder of cryptocurrency firm FTX is set to serve twenty-five years behind bars after misleading customers and investors.
Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) would oversee one of the biggest financial investment collapses in American history and would set a grim watershed for digital currency.
Samuel Bankman-Fried, FTX founder jailed
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan would ignore the pleas of SBF who said that investors did not lose money in the collapse of the currency.
Judge Kaplan laid down a sentence of twenty-five years to the founder of FTX and Alameda Research.
SBF was found to have misappropriated billions of dollars that customers of the crypto exchange had believed viable and defrauded lenders to Alameda of more than $1.3 billion.
Attorney General Merrick B Garland would say “Anyone who believes they can hide their financial crimes behind wealth and power, or behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand, should think twice. I am grateful to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI for their outstanding work in bringing Mr. Bankman-Fried to justice.”
SBF was the Chief Executive Officer and founder of FTX, from 2019 through 2022 where he would hatch a plot that would see him embezzle billions of dollars for his personal use.
- He would also distribute the ill-gotten gains as political contributions and to keep his crypto trading company Alameda Research in business.
- SBF was found to have lied to investors in the crypto company and according to the Justice Department would give false information about how the company funds were utilized.
- SBF would also deny links from FTX to Alameda, but in truth, both companies were linked by his ferrying of funds from both companies.
- The Justice Department statement read that supposedly “Alameda, did not have any privileged access to FTX and did not receive special treatment from FTX. Those statements were false, and Bankman-Fried in fact channelled billions of dollars in customer deposits from FTX to Alameda, and then used those funds to make investments for his own benefit, to make political contributions, and to spend on real estate, among other expenditures.
He employed a variety of fraudulent means to perpetrate this fraud. For instance, Bankman-Fried directed co-conspirators to alter FTX’s computer code to allow Alameda to withdraw effectively unlimited amounts of cryptocurrency from the exchange.”
Judge Kaplan has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use the seized funds of FTX and SBF’s accounts to redistribute the people affected by his crimes.
