In yet another story that highlights mixing people’s real money with fake money has consequences, another cryptocurrency magnate has fallen. Here is the story of SBF.
Thursday evening, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of all seven of the charges he faced. They included wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and consipracy to commit money laundering. To be fair, isn’t crypto just money laundering for tech bros?
A jury in New York handed him the verdict in four and a half hours. He will be sentenced by Judle Lewis Kaplan on March 28th. SBF faces decades of jail time. I’m sure the people who lost millions of dollars through him would love to see that but would like to see that money more.
Timeline
For those who may not know, SBF founded FTX in 2019. It was one of those companies that saw a meteoric rise to the top when everyone was locked in during the pandemic and needed to do something with their crypto.
However, during all that, as many of SBF’s previous colleagues testified in court, while SBF said FTX was safe to do business, inside the company was anything but. FTX started falsifying its numbers. The trading firm, Alameda Research, which SBF had a hand in, had super secret access to FTX. This included a $65 billion line of credit. FTX even allowed Alameda to dip into customer funds if they needed a bit more cash.
Things kinda hit the fan in November of 2022 when Coindesk released an article revealing FTX’s business practices. It didn’t help that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao decided he was done with FTX.
After that, SBF resigned while FTX filed for bankruptcy. While he escaped FTX, he couldn’t escape civil and criminal charges.
SBF had a rough go of it waiting for the trial. He violated bail conditions by using a VPN to watch a football game. He also thought it was smart to leak his ex-girlfriend’s diary. You know, the ex-CEO of Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison. By the way, she pled guilty and flipped on him. Ouch!
Not only did she flip, but the co-founder of FTX, Gary Wang along with Adam Yedidia, both of whom were SBF’s roommates pled guilty and flipped.
SBF’s defense was that he is too young to know better and that he didn’t touch the code, but everything was contradicted by everyone else involved.
Honestly, I’ve said it for years and will continue to say it. Crypto is a huge scam and I’m glad to see accountability to all involved who enabled it to happen and sucker so many people out of hard earned money.
But it shows what capitalists want to do to everyone. Take their money and give them nothing in return.
Nothing!
Source: The Verge
