“Digital Currency”

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried cannot prepare for his trial in jail without access to computers, medications and a ‘better diet’, his lawyers told the court Tuesday.

The disgraced vegan billionaire, 31, is being fed a ‘flesh diet’ and forced to subsist on bread, water and peanut butter – which his lawyers slammed as ‘outrageous’.

His legal team also complained that the crypto whizz kid, who appeared in Manhattan Federal court on Tuesday with his legs shackled, was unable to prepare without his correct medication.

Caroline Ellison, the former girlfriend of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was secretly recorded as she blamed her ex for a fateful decision to use customer funds to plug financial holes in the crypto giant’s failed hedge fund, according to court documents.

The recording of Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, the hedge fund through which Bankman-Fried allegedly used FTX customer funds to make risky bets, was made by an Alameda employee during an all-hands meeting on Nov. 9.

Sammy is in trouble.

Sam Bankman-Fried used stolen customer funds to make over $100million in campaign contributions ahead of the 2022 midterms, prosecutors have claimed.

The new indictment, filed Monday, charges the 31-year-old with seven counts of conspiracy and fraud over the collapse of the exchange.

He has previously pleaded not guilty. Mark Botnick, a spokesman for Bankman-Fried, declined to comment.

Inmates inside the prison where disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is to be held during his trial have previously been stuck in freezing cells with limited power for a week.

The Metropolitan Detention Center houses more than 1,600 inmates and is situated near the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

As well as new inmate Bankman-Fried, the prison had previously held high profile individuals including R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Martin Shkreli.

NEW YORK (AP) — FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sent to jail Friday to await trial after a bail hearing for the fallen cryptocurrency wiz left a judge convinced that he had repeatedly tried to influence witnesses against him.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered Bankman-Fried’s bail revoked after prosecutors said he’d tried to harass a key witness in his fraud case last month when he showed a journalist her private writings and in January when he reached out to the general counsel for FTX with an encrypted communication.

The NYTimes article on the Bail Revocation fleshes out the situation a bit more as it should given their involvement.

Evidently Judges look upon witness tampering as a “Bad Thing.” In another pleasant surprise it appears the Illegal Campaign Contribution charges recently dropped due to an extradition technicality are able to be resurrected. Looks like Sammy was expendable after all.

This is the NYTimes article that got SBF’s bail revoked – Inside the Private Writings of Caroline Ellison, Star Witness in the FTX Case

Three months before the cryptocurrency market imploded last year, Caroline Ellison, the 27-year-old chief executive of the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research, was racked with self-doubt.

“I have been feeling pretty unhappy and overwhelmed with my job,” Ms. Ellison wrote in a Google document in February 2022. She added: “At the end of the day I can’t wait to go home and turn off my phone and have a drink and get away from it all.”

Ms. Ellison had a lot on her mind. She did not think that she was well suited to running Alameda or particularly decisive as a leader, she wrote in another Google document. She was also going through a breakup with Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire entrepreneur who had founded Alameda and then FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. They had dated on and off, and Ms. Ellison worried about “making things weird” and “causing drama.”

Sotheby’s is being sued by investors over an auction of more than 100 images of cartoon monkeys.

The 279-year-old auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit alongside celebrities including Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber and Madonna who promoted Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a series of 10,000 collectible, digital monkeys.

This scam was so blatant it’s hard to believe it could be pulled off.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped a campaign finance charge against disgraced former crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) on Wednesday night, according to a court document from the Southern District of New York.

Authorities assert that SBF, co-founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, and its associates, utilized customer deposits for $90 million in campaign contributions to around 300 candidates or political action committees, according to The New York Times. The DOJ’s letter to the New York court states that it is not pursuing the charge because The Bahamas did not plan to extradite SBF to the U.S. on it.

Talk about a technicality.

🚨BREAKING: The U.S. Department of Justice Dropped Charges of Campaign Finance Violations Against Crypto Scammer FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

DOJ just sent a strong message that scamming people of millions is not a crime as long your donations end up supporting Democrats and… pic.twitter.com/g3gVwQrn0f

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) July 27, 2023

h/t Mauser

Disgraced FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been slapped with a gag order preventing him from speaking publicly about his blockbuster trial in October, as prosecutors lobbied a federal judge to jail him until the case is heard.

The 31-year-old former crypto billionaire was back in a Manhattan courthouse Wednesday after allegedly trying to tamper with the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, his ex-girlfriend and former business partner Caroline Ellison.

Prosecutors alleged that he leaked intimate messages from Ellison to the New York Times to discredit her, because she is expected to testify against him during his trial.

Sam Bankman-Fried paid his legal defense team $10 million using funds that were stolen from FTX’s sister hedge fund, Alameda Research — and which had been gifted to the 31-year-old crypto crook’s father, a new lawsuit alleges.

The complaint — filed in Delaware bankruptcy court on Thursday — divulged that a so-called “Bankman Gift Transfer” for $10 million was made from Bankman-Fried’s FTX account “to his father’s personal account on the FTX US exchange.”

“On information and belief, Bankman-Fried’s father has been using this ‘gift’ to finance Bankman-Fried’s criminal defense,” the documents stated.