The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that Samuel Bankman-Fried, co-founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The sentence, delivered by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, also includes three years of supervised release and an order for Bankman-Fried to pay $11 billion in forfeiture. The 25 years given are shorter than the 40 to 50 years federal prosecutors had sought after Bankman-Fried was found guilty of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.
While his charges carried a maximum penalty of 110 years and his lawyers asked for a sentence of six and a half years, Sam Bankman-Fried was ultimately sentenced to 25 years. In court, Bankman-Fried did not visibly react when handed down the sentence.
The DOJ elaborated on SBF’s misdeeds, detailing he misappropriated billions of dollars of customer funds deposited with FTX and defrauded investors in FTX of more than $1.7 billion and lenders to Alameda of over $1.3 billion. These actions led to SBF being found guilty of multiple charges, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland commented on the case saying that “anyone who believes they can hide their financial crimes behind wealth and power, or behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand, should think twice.”
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York also weighed in, characterizing SBF’s actions as one of the largest financial frauds in history:
“The scale of his crimes is measured not just by the amount of money that was stolen, but by the extraordinary harm caused to victims, who in some cases had their life savings wiped out overnight.”
Judge Kaplan granted permission for the authorities to allocate the assets obtained via forfeiture to reimburse the victims of Bankman-Fried’s offenses.
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- Source: https://www.cryptocompare.com/email-updates/daily/2024/mar/29/
