AFPSam Bankman-Fried at the courtroom
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 02:09
An American jury has found crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of billions in fraud. He has diverted capital from the crypto marketplace FTX, which he founded, as it became apparent when the company went bankrupt last year. With its demise, the money siphoned off also evaporated.
“He withdrew the money knowing it was wrong,” the prosecutor concluded his plea against Bankman-Fried. “But he did it anyway because he thought he was smarter and better. He thought he could get out of it.”
Bankman-Fried (31) was seen as a new Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur who had out of nowhere become the leading force in a new market. With his messy hair and T-shirts and shorts instead of a suit, he was the embodiment of the Silicon Valley mentality, in which courage and technological knowledge are decisive.
By capitalizing on the rise of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum, he went from being dirt poor to being extremely rich within a year and a half. Because his FTX became the second largest trading place for those digital currencies, Bankman-Fried was already worth more than 20 billion before the age of thirty.
Mega scammer
At the end of last year, however, the empire turned out to be a giant with feet of clay. Bankman-Fried appeared to be deviously using the money that investors worldwide deposited with FTX for his own whims. He had built in a code that made it possible to withdraw up to $65 billion of capital without any collateral.
“Everything is fine with FTX, everything is fine with the assets,” Bankman-Fried tweeted just before the company collapsed. When investors wanted to empty their bank accounts, the company turned out to be an empty shell. Bankman-Fried was suspected of stealing at least $8 billion. Now he was no longer compared to Jobs or Musk, but to mega-con artist Bernie Madoff.
The crypto king himself insisted that he had fallen victim to bad financial advice. He simply had not noticed what had gone wrong with money being diverted from FTX. He maintained his innocence to the judge.
Appgroup Wirefraud
The prosecutors did not believe this, if only because the suspects discussed their actions in an app group called Wirefraud, digital fraud. The Public Prosecution Service got three of Bankman-Fried’s co-suspects, including his ex-girlfriend, to testify against him during the month-long trial. The regretters themselves hoped for a reduced sentence.
It took the jury just four hours to find Bankman-Fried guilty. He listened to the verdict standing in silence, his hands clenched in front of him. When he sat down again, he kept his head bent forward for several minutes.
The judge will announce on March 28 what kind of sentence Sam Bankman-Fried will receive. It could result in a prison sentence of decades.
2023-11-03 01:09:38
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