Sam Bankman-Fried Guilty on All Charges
He couldn’t talk his way out of this one.
Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty on all seven charges in connection with the crypto fraud at FTX.
It really wasn’t that complicated a case. It was an old-fashioned Ponzi scheme using a complicated product, but the underlying fraud was the same as Bernie Madoff and a lot of other ponzi scheme operators, as I explained to Stuart Varney on October 3, 2023:
I predictws guilty verdicts in an interview with Fox Business radio earlier this week:
(if player does not load, click here)
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CNN lists the guilty verdicts:
Jurors deliberated from 3:15 pm ET to 7:45 pm ET.
The former crypto billionaire was found guilty of:
Count one: Wire fraud on customers of FTX
Count two: Conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers of FTX
Count three: Wire fraud on Alameda Research lenders
Count four: Conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders to Alameda Research
Count five: Conspiracy to commit securities fraud on investors in FTX
Count six: Conspiracy to commit commodities fraud on customers of FTX
Count seven: Conspiracy to commit money laundering
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Comments
Uh huh. So? Wake me when the cell door goes *clang*.
It went ‘clang’ about an hour ago. In federal court (like most other courts), when a defendant is found guilty, their bail is revoked and they’re taken into custody immediately…which SBK was. He’ll be held in a federal detention center in NYC (likely the same one where Epstein ‘killed himself’ until the remainder of his case is resolved; he still has a number of charges that have yet to go to trial. He will not walk freely in the world for a period of time that will be measured in decades, not years.
He had his bail revoked before trial, so he has been there for a couple of months already.
That’s right. I forgot his bail was indeed revoked.
Federal sentancing guidelines–so really likely they will. Won’t be a state prison though–so SBF had that going for him. It will be low security if he behaves and he might even get some ok vegan food.
Jon Corzine was home watching the trial on TV laughing his butt off. I hear Corzine has been taunting Sam Fried over Twitter, posting poop emojis and laughing faces.
Better watch his back
Epstein
SBF did not have the sort of black mail material that Epstein did. My only surprise was why didn’t Epstein not kill himself sooner.
It takes time to get the right people in place so they aren’t any squeals from witnesses.
What about the girlfriend? Is her trial ongoing, or was she helping nail him on this?
His girlfriend and several others all reached negotiated pleas in exchange for their cooperation. I’m not sure what her sentence is…she likely hasn’t been sentenced yet.
Thank you!
Yeah, what about Smeagol? I love how the courtroom artist made SBF look like Brad Pitt and her like Gollum.
Claw back the ill-begotten gains from his University Prof parents?
They are criminals, too, and need to be tried and imprisoned, themselves. They were big parts of this whole scheme and instrumental in the fraudulent laundering of stolen money to the dems.
I heard something about that.. Maybe they were the driving force?
Yeah, there was all sorts of shady AF shifting of funds to his Parents among others as the ship was going down.
Would also love to see more reporting on which Politicians have not returned the political contributions from this swindler. Dude was reportedly the 2nd largest donor to the d/prog behind Soros, though he did sprinkle some campaign funds to a few GoP members in position to assist him. I suspect the DC establishment and the lapdog legacy media isn’t gonna push too hard on this point going forward. Might get a bump but after a day or three the story gonna drop off a cliff IMO.
Both of his parents are leftist law professors (one emeritus) at Stanford University.
Don’t forget all the politicians that benefitted frm his ill gotten gains.
And here I bet he thought he paid off all the right people.
Bankman-Fried did not kill himself.
I’d be OK with prosecutors giving him some time off if he incriminates several senators, including at least some from his preferred Democratic party.
As soon as he’s old enough to shave, he better be careful. Might accidentally cut his head off while shaving.
He could never talk his way out of much of anything. Right before FTX went belly up Bankman gave an interview where he clearly admitted that the interest people were paying on these crypto-lending schemes was nothing but a Ponzi scheme rooted in the price of the underlying crypto “asset” continuing to rise because of nothing but hype that no one even understood. A guy wrote a couple of articles about the jaw-dropping nature of Bankman’s admission in plain English … then, a couple of months later FTX imploded and was gone.
Most people in crypto have no clue what they are doing but they take advantage of the fact that the rest of the population has even less of an idea. Meanwhile, all of crypto hinges on the idea that certain hash functions and encoding schemes will not be broken – and they are not provably unbreakable. This means that, at any point, the whole edifice of crypto, as it’s structured now, could come crashing down in an instant. To have trillions of dollars invested in such a system is a bit … crazy.
People also don’t seem to understand that cryptos, as with everything, are owned and run by certain groups. For Bitcoin, for example, it’s the miners that determine everything about bitcoin. And anyone who doubts what this could mean need only look at Ethereum and what the miners did after the crew there screwed up the launch of the DAO and some inventive guy figured out a way to drain transactions because the DAO code was junk. The Ethereum miners just decided to retroactively fork the blockchain and undo all the transactions that had taken place in the meantime – all of them!! You cannot have a worse entity to use as money if transactions can be retroactively deleted at any time – which is exactly what they did at Ethereum … and then made pretend that nothing had happened. Most people don’t even know what I’m talking about! Look it up. It will be very enlightening.
TY… Nailed it.. crypto, bitcoin, dogecoin, they totally baffle me, along with NFTs and blockchain.
I made thousands on nothing with bitcoin.
I just read Zeke Faux’s “Number Go Up” about the crypto industry. It’s 90% fraud/ponzi. (At least 90%.). Good book. Interesting. Recommended.
Fried, Fried, at last!
Laundered for whom?
How much money did foreign actors put in the pot? Which of our politicians/PACs/regulatory officials got money from the pot?
Those are the two questions that need answers. I don’t care about one guy defrauding people. I care about organized corruption in our ruling parasites.
I’m sure he’s wondering now why he didn’t take a small portion of those billions and flee to some nonextradition jurisidction.
Sam Banknan. Fried.
His goose is cooked also.
What really amazes me is not that he couldn’t talk his way out of it, but that he couldn’t buy/bribe his way out of it.
Too soon to tell . . .
His sicko mother set him up for this to launder $ for the Dems?