Now you can call him “Sam Bankman-Fraud.” A Manhattan federal jury has convicted Sam Bankman-Fried of stealing $10 billion from users of his crypto exchange and lying to lenders and investors — capping a fall from grace for an ex-billionaire who was once viewed as one of the crypto world’s brightest stars. The 31-year-old disgraced tech mogul was found guilty of all seven fraud and conspiracy charges stemming from a scheme to swipe money from users of his FTX exchange to pay off debts at his failing hedge fund Alameda Research and purchase lavish real estate. Bankman-Fried, wearing a gray suit and purple tie, stood calmly with his hands folded across his lap as the verdict was read in a packed Manhattan federal courtroom Thursday night. The jury, comprised of nine women and three men, deliberated for just four hours before reaching a decision. The former crypto golden boy’s conviction followed a month-long trial coming roughly one year after his companies imploded in November 2022, leaving thousands of customers unable to withdraw their funds. He faced seven counts including wire fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. He faces up to 115 years in prison when he’s sentenced on March 28. Bankman-Fried made the rare and risky choice to testify in his own defense. He claimed more than 100 times during four days on the witness stand that he could not “recall” repeatedly promising that his platform was “safe” — or ordering an underling to build secret computer code allowing Alameda to siphon FTX customer funds. The cocky math whiz was then confronted with a mountain of tweets, emails, congressional appearances and media interviews revealing that he did did in fact say dozens of things he claimed not to remember. “He thought he could fool reporters, the public, and now you,” federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon said in a final pitch to jurors Thursday morning. “You know better,” Sassoon added. Bankman-Fried testified that his companies went bankrupt because of honest “mistakes,’’ not crimes. He claimed repeatedly not to “recall” ordering Alameda — which he described publicly as a “neutral piece of market infrastructure” — to have an unheard-of arrangement allowing it to hoover up FTX funds with a near-unlimited line of credit. Bankman-Fried chalked up the collapse to “oversights” in “risk management” and testified that he wasn’t aware that his hedge fund had “borrowed” billions from his exchange until days before the implosion. Federal prosecutors blasted these claims — and dozens of other statements made by Bankman-Fried in his time running FTX — as part of a “pyramid of deceit” meant to obscure the fallen crypto king’s role in masterminding the massive fraud. “You can’t walk into a jewelry store, steal a diamond necklace and then walk out and say there was no security guard,” Sassoon said at the end of her closing statement in the case. “He knew what he was doing was wrong — that’s why he didn’t hire a risk officer.” The feds’ star witness Caroline Ellison, who served as Alameda’s CEO and also dated Bankman-Fried, also confronted the disgraced crypto mogul in court, matter-of-factly telling jurors that her ex-beau decided to make off with customers’ digital cash. “He directed me to commit these crimes,” Ellison said, pointing at her former lover seated at the defense table. Bankman-Fried was willing to both lie and steal if he believed that doing so would benefit the “greater good” of society, Ellison told jurors in one of her most damning pieces of testimony. Ellison and fellow ex-FTX executives Gary Wang and Nishad Singh all pleaded guilty to fraud charges and testified against their former boss, telling jurors that the cocky math whiz ordered Singh to give Alameda so-called “backdoor” access to customer funds. “To believe the defendant’s story you’d have to ignore all the evidence,” prosecutor Nicholas Roos added in his closing statement this week. “You would have to ignore the testimony of his partners in crime.” A lawyer for Bankman-Fried said in his closing statement said the feds had unfairly portrayed an honest entrepreneur as “some sort of monster” who set out to steal from his customers. Cohen also tried to sow doubt on the testimony of Ellison and other former FTX brass, claiming that their stories sounded like rehearsed roles in a Hollywood movie where Bankman-Fried was cast as a “villain.” The prosecution focused on painting Bankman as a “villain” by bringing up details like Bankman-Fried’s famously casual wardrobe and unkempt hairdo — which he’s traded during the trial for a suit and more tightly-cropped haircut done by a fellow inmate at his Brooklyn lockup — to distract jurors from gaps in the case, Cohen claimed. “We’ll agree that there was a time that Sam probably was the worst-dressed CEO in the world and probably had the worst haircut,” Cohen quipped in his closing statement. “That’s not a crime.” Jurors also heard from victims who lost money they’d invested in cryptocurrency held with FTX. The feds’ first witness was French cocoa trader Marc-Antoine Julliard testified that he was never able to retrieve funds worth around $100,000 after seeing ads and interviews depicting Bankman-Fried as the “future face of the crypto industry.” At the close of trial, federal Judge Lewis Kaplan had offered to provide pizza for the jurors and provide car services to take them home if they stayed past the court’s usual closing time of 5 p.m. Thursday. On the witness stand, he appeared to show little to no emotion while recounting his version of why his companies folded. But he admitted that his businesses’ meltdown was a steep fall from what he set out to accomplish when he founded FTX in 2019. “We thought we could build the best product on the market,” he said when his lawyer Cohen asked him why he started his company. “Did it work out that way?” Cohen then asked him. Bankman-Fried responded in a flat, nasal monotone. “No, it turned out basically the opposite of that,” he said, before adding: “A lot of people got hurt.”
Sam Bankman-Fried convicted of $10 billion fraud, capping crypto king’s epic fall
