“Digital Currency”

Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle who helped send down the disgraced crypto king are likely to face ‘relatively short’ sentences in a minimum security prison if they are jailed, a convicted fraudster has revealed.

Disgraced FTX founder SBF was found guilty of embezzling $10 billion of his clients’ money in what the prosecutor said was ‘one of the biggest financial frauds in American history’ on Thursday night and faces up to 115 years in jail.

Ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang and engineering chief Nishad Singh all took to the stand against the former FTX boss and ultimately helped secure his conviction.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the tousle-haired mogul who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was convicted on Thursday of seven charges of fraud and conspiracy after a monthlong trial that laid bare the rampant hubris and risk-taking across the crypto industry.

Mr. Bankman-Fried became a symbol of crypto’s excesses last year when FTX collapsed and he was charged with stealing as much as $10 billion from customers to finance political contributions, venture capital investments and other extravagant spending. A jury of nine women and three men took just over four hours of deliberation on Thursday to reach a verdict, convicting Mr. Bankman-Fried of wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.

BREAKING: Crypto scammer Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty on all charges in his first criminal trial.

The New York jury determined Bankman-Fried defrauded customers, investors and lenders.

Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven charges and faces a whopping maximum… pic.twitter.com/fXcjS4G8pC

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 3, 2023

After conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said the verdict sends a message to every "fraudster out there who thinks that they’re untouchable."

"Those folks should think again. And if they don’t, I promise we’ll have enough handcuffs for all of them." pic.twitter.com/MxoVtW7nTJ

— ABC News (@ABC) November 3, 2023

He will appeal.

“Did you say in private, ‘Fuck regulators?’ ”

The first audience members started arriving around 10 p.m. on Sunday night, even though the event wouldn’t begin for another eleven and a half hours.

The people in line weren’t waiting for Taylor Swift tickets, or some new Apple device, but for a coveted seat in U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s courtroom in lower Manhattan, where alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was on trial. Only 21 seats were reserved for the press and the public, and it was first come, first served. If you wanted to be in that courtroom—to be able to see the reactions of SBF’s parents, say, or Kaplan’s expression as he chastised the defendant (which he did regularly)—there was no such thing as getting to the courthouse too early. By midnight, all the seats had been accounted for.

Best read on the trial’s progress to date IMO.

Sammy had better hope for a pardon or else he’ll never see the light of day.

On the final day of his testimony in court, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has admitted he ‘deeply regrets not taking a deeper look’ into the borrowing of $8 billion in customer deposits by his sister firm Alameda Research.

The alleged crypto fraudster periodically smirked and frowned in response to questions about the collapse of his bitcoin empire in November 2022 by prosecutor Danielle Sassoon, and gave a slew of evasive answers.

He is accused of committing one of the biggest financial frauds in American history – by using FTX customer deposits to prop up risky investments in fledgling hedge fund Alameda, which he ran with his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison.

I have no doubt the jury will convict as it sounds he behaved like a jerk throughout.

But how long will he get? Will he be pardoned?

Blaming your ex-girlfriend for the collapse of a currency trading exchange and the loss of billions of dollars is a bold move.

The stakes are even higher when you are in a federal court in Manhattan facing an effective life sentence if found guilty. But that is the hand Sam Bankman-Fried chose to play as he testified in his own defence on Monday.

Bankman-Fried, 31, is accused of diverting billions of dollars from customer accounts on his digital currency trading platform FTX to the trading firm Alameda Research, which he also owned, but which was partly run by his former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison. He has been charged with fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, which he denies.

A squirrely Sam Bankman-Fried tried to squirm his way out of answering questions during a surprise hearing at his Manhattan federal fraud trial Thursday — as he claimed his trading firm had been “permitted” to “borrow” the $8 billion in FTX user funds he is charged with stealing.

Bankman-Fried, 31, flailed as prosecutor Danielle Sassoon grilled him on the stand after the judge sent jurors home for the day to go over what evidence would be included in the accused crypto crook’s hotly-anticipated Friday morning testimony.