Sam Bankman-Fried sentencing: Convicted FTX cryptocurrency fraudster awaits fate
Sam Bankman-Fried will learn his sentence Thursday, four months after he was found guilty of orchestrating the multibillion-dollar fraud that prompted the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
Sam Bankman-Fried will learn his sentence Thursday, four months after he was found guilty of orchestrating the multibillion-dollar fraud that prompted the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
A federal jury in New York City convicted Bankman-Fried, 32, in November on each of the two counts of fraud and five counts of conspiracy he faced. He has been jailed at the Metropolitan Detention Center facility in Brooklyn ever since, with his bail having been revoked over witness-tampering allegations.
Federal prosecutors are seeking as much as 50 years of the statutory 110-year sentence implied by the conviction. Bankman-Fried apparently lacks a criminal history, and prosecutors rarely seek the statutory maximum, said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia University Law School specializing in white-collar criminal defense.
But the nature of the fraud, Bankman-Fried's comfortable upbringing and the scale of losses to victims led prosecutors to nevertheless seek an aggressive sentence.
"In every part of his business, and with respect to each crime committed, the defendant demonstrated a brazen disrespect for the rule of law," the prosecutors wrote. "He understood the rules, but decided they did not apply to him. He knew what society deemed illegal and unethical, but disregarded that based on a pernicious megalomania guided by the defendant’s own values and sense of superiority."
Rating: 5