The sentence, while shorter than prosecutors’ original request of 40 to 50 years in prison, is longer than the four to five years sought by Sam’s lawyers. The judge also ordered the forfeiture of more than $11 billion of Sam’s assets, which will be used to pay back victims of FTX’s collapse during its bankruptcy proceedings.
Photo: Reuters
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According to the judge, FTX customers lost $8 billion, investors lost $1.7 billion, and participants in the hedge fund Alameda Research, founded by Bankman-Fried, lost $1.3 billion.
The sentence was handed down by Judge Lewis Kaplan in a Manhattan federal court after he dismissed Sam’s claims that FTX customers did not actually lose money and accused him of lying on the stand during his trial. The jury had previously found Sam guilty of eight fraud counts stemming from the 2022 collapse of FTX, one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.
In his sentencing, however, Judge Kaplan described SBF as “extraordinarily bright, but also quite immature.” He said that SBF had wanted to become a major political player and that this had led to his crimes.
At the sentencing hearing, defense attorney Marc Mukasey did not dispute the charges against his client. In court, Mukasey described Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) as not being a financial Bernie Madoff who set out each morning to harm people. Mukasey also argued that SBF could have fixed problems at FTX if he had been given time.
Mukasey said that SBF was “motivated by greed and ambition.” However, he presented information in support of a lighter sentence for his client, including his work teaching two men serving life sentences about finance.
In court, SBF expressed remorse and apologized for the consequences of his actions. He admitted that he had made a series of bad decisions that led to FTX’s collapse. He and his co-founders, Gary Wang and former girlfriend Caroline Ellison, had intended to build something beautiful, but SBF said they had “blown it up.”
SBF also said it was very painful for him to see what FTX customers had gone through. “It’s embarrassing. They didn’t deserve this,” he said.
However, prosecutor Nicolas Roos did not accept SBF’s apology, arguing that FTX was built on “a foundation of fraud from the get-go.” He said that SBF’s theft of over $8 billion was not a liquidity crisis or poor management, but a criminal act.
The sentence marks a dramatic fall from grace for Sam Bankman-Fried, once a crypto billionaire and darling of the tech world. After the sentencing, he left court without further comment from his lawyers.
Sam Bankman-Fried, born in 1992, founded the crypto exchange FTX in 2019, which became a major rival to Coinbase and Binance. FTX had more than one million creditors, including several major technology companies such as Apple, Meta, Netflix, LinkedIn, Adobe, AWS, and more.
