Six counts, including fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering: the “king” of cryptocurrencies Sam Bankman-Fried risked up to 110 years in prison. The prosecution had asked for half, but the former founder and CEO of Ftx, a cryptocurrency exchange company, was sentenced by Lewis Kaplan, district judge of the federal court in Manhattan, to 25 years. The entrepreneur is held responsible for having stolen 8 billion dollars from his clients, 1.7 from equity investors and 1.3 from the financiers of the Alameda Research hedge fund, founded by Bankman-Fried himself. For Kaplan, the “crypto king” lied during the trial, having declared that he was unaware of what happened and that the clients had been reimbursed in full through the bankruptcy process.
“I threw it all away”
“A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully gambles away the stolen money is not entitled to a reduced sentence by using his Las Vegas winnings to pay back all or part of the stolen money when he is finally caught,” commented the judge. The “crypto king” has definitively lost his crown, as had already partly happened when, after the collapse of FTX, he was accused and left his home in the Bahamas to face trial in the United States. “The whole company followed me across continents, working until 2 or 4 in the morning, dedicating themselves to FTX,” Bankman-Fried said before the sentence, before which he remained impassive. “I remember so many. They put a lot of themselves into it, and I threw it all away. This haunts me every day. I’m sorry about what happened. There are things I should have done and said, things I shouldn’t have done,” he concluded.
The parents commented on the judge’s decision by saying that they will continue to fight for their son, who, according to New York authorities, committed “one of the largest financial frauds”.
