American entrepreneur and co-founder of the failed crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for defrauding users of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Yesterday, United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan called the defense argument misleading, logically flawed, and speculative.
Details About the Fraud Case
Kaplan said Bankman-Fried had obstructed justice and tampered with witnesses in mounting his defense — something Kaplan said he weighed in his sentencing decision.
Before reading the sentence on Thursday in a two-hour hearing, Judge Lewis Kaplan provided a harsh assessment of Bankman-Fried’s behaviour, saying he had lied during his testimony at trial when he claimed he was unaware until the last minute that his companies were taking money entrusted to them for safe-keeping by customers and using it for other purposes.
What Bankman-Fried Said
Bankman-Fried, wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, struck an apologetic tone, saying he had made a series of ‘selfish’ decisions while leading FTX and ‘threw it all away.’
‘It haunts me every day,’ he said in a statement. ‘There are a lot of mistakes that I made.’
One of The Biggest Financial Frauds in US History.
Bankman-Fried, however, told the court that FTX had the ability to repay customers when it collapsed.
Meanwhile, the prosecutors said Bankman-Fried took more than $10bn (£7.9bn) from unsuspecting customers in ‘one of the biggest financial frauds’ in US history.
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FTX was one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges before its demise in 2022, and was valued at $32bn.
As a result, Bankman-Fried became a business celebrity and attracted millions of customers who are celebrities, business titans and politicians who used the platform to buy and trade cryptocurrency.
Prosecutors had sought as much as 50 years, while Bankman-Fried’s legal team argued for no more than six and half years.
He was convicted on seven criminal counts in November and has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since.
Bankman-Fried’s legal team will appeal against his conviction.
