NEW YORK: Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency wunderkind, was found guilty in one of the largest financial fraud cases in history and was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday.
After a five-week trial that examined the one-time high roller’s dramatic decline, a New York jury convicted Bankman-Fried, also known by his initials SBF, guilty in November. US prosecutors were requesting a 40–50 year jail sentence.
Bankman-Fried apologized to the court throughout the hearing, saying he was “sorry about what happened at every stage.” I also did some things that I shouldn’t have done and some that I should have.” They “created something exquisite,” according to Bankman-Fried. “And I threw everything away.” US District Judge Lewis Kaplan handed down the final punishment after meticulously going over the financial offenses committed by Bankman-Fried during the hearing.
The judge declared that there was “never a word of remorse for the commission of a terrible crime,” and that Bankman-Fried ran the risk of committing crimes in the future.
After the sentence was completed, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys declared they will file an appeal of his conviction.
The government requested a lengthy prison sentence for Bankman-Fried, citing his “unmatched greed and hubris” as evidence of his seven-count conviction. The government thinks that Bankman-Fried has committed fraud worth more than $10 billion.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers described their client as a hardworking young man driven by charity who got into too much trouble, branding the government’s suggested punishment as “barbaric.” Their representation is comparable to the defense put up by SBF during the trial, which the jury swiftly rejected after just five hours of consideration. Bankman-defense Fried’s team, headed by Marc Mukasey, requested a six-year prison sentence, arguing that this would allow him to “promptly return to a productive role in society.”
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus and billionaire before turning thirty, Bankman-Fried dominated the cryptocurrency space with lightning speed, transforming FTX, a modest start-up he cofounded in 2019, into the second-biggest exchange platform globally.
However, the FTX empire collapsed in November 2022 due to its inability to handle the influx of enormous withdrawal demands from consumers who were alarmed to discover that a portion of the money kept at the company had been used for riskier ventures at Bankman-Fried’s own hedge fund, Alameda Research.
