Cryptocurrencies | Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty, faces 110 years in prison

(New York, San Francisco) Accused of fraud, criminal conspiracy and money laundering, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty Thursday by a New York jury of the seven counts brought against him, after five weeks of a resounding trial.

“SBF”, the fallen star of cryptocurrencies, faces up to 110 years of criminal imprisonment in total. His sentence is to be pronounced at a later date.

After less than five hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of using, without their knowledge, funds deposited by customers of his cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX, which went bankrupt in November 2022.

The money fueled venture trading and investments by his investment firm, Alameda Research, whose borrowings from the platform reached up to about $14 billion.

“Sam Bankman-Fried committed one of the largest financial frauds in American history,” Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams said after the verdict was read. “A multi-billion dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto. »

It is a success for the prosecution, which buried “SBF” under millions of documents, several of which are damning, as well as the testimonies of three of his former close collaborators, including his former girlfriend.

All claimed to have acted under the direction of their former boss, who was in charge of all the key decisions that enabled the misappropriation of client money and senseless risk-taking by Alameda.

“Who was in control? That’s the question,” said deputy prosecutor Nicolas Roos at the hearing on Wednesday. “It was one person: the accused. »

” Warning ”

Faced with this barrier, the former billionaire, whose fortune soared with the implosion of FTX and Alameda, tried to plead good faith, presenting the face of a young entrepreneur with no experience rather than that of a criminal.

He admitted to “big mistakes”, but always denied knowingly breaking the law.

His lawyer, Mark Cohen, accused, at the hearing, the prosecutor of presenting him as a “monster”, a “bad guy”, by caricaturing his actions and his personality.

The young thirty-year-old even chose to testify at his trial, a rare initiative because it was considered too risky.

But this hearing, failing to strengthen him, weakened him even more, the former crypto educator, with superior intelligence, showing himself to be elusive and convoluted under the fire of the prosecution’s questions.

To exonerate the accused, “you would have to believe that he understood nothing” about what was happening within his own companies, deputy prosecutor Nicolas Roos said on Wednesday. “You have followed this entire trial and you know that none of this is true,” he insisted to the jury.

Sam Bankman-Fried also tried to accuse his former colleagues, sometimes accusing them of incompetence, sometimes of having warned him too late or insufficiently of Alameda’s financial situation.

“We respect the jury’s decision, but we are very disappointed with the result,” responded Mark Cohen.

The bankruptcy of FTX, which came after six months of turbulence and other failures, penalized the world of cryptocurrencies, which is barely recovering from this crossing of the desert.

“The cryptocurrency industry may be new, with new players like Sam Bankman-Fried, but this type of fraud, corruption, is as old as time,” commented Damian Williams.

For the federal prosecutor, Thursday’s verdict “is a message, a warning to all the crooks who think they are untouchable, who think their crimes are too complex for us to catch them.”

“Let them think twice,” he warned. “If they persist, we will have enough handcuffs for everyone. »