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A New York Jury Found Sam Bankman-Fried, The Founder Of FTX, Guilty Of Fraud
Convicted of fraud, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO and founder of FTX, misappropriated $8 billion from his clients and financiers, ultimately resulting in the demise of his cryptocurrency empire.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of FTX, was found guilty by a New York jury after a five-week trial on charges of defrauding his consumers and lenders, as reported by CoinDesk. The date of sentencing has been marked for March 28 of the following year, Reuters reports.
Bankman-Fried, age 31, was apprehended in December of last year and subsequently brought to trial on charges of defrauding FTX investors, customers, and lenders of Alameda Research. He appeared in court in early October after entering a not-guilty plea to all charges. Prosecutors at the federal level endeavoured to depict Bankman-Fried as an individual who intentionally intended to misappropriate the funds of his clients, totaling approximately $8 billion, for utilisation in real estate transactions, sports sponsorships, and venture capital investments.
His defence team contended that he was an overworked merchant who erroneously believed the company funds he utilised belonged to the companies themselves, as opposed to their investors or customers. While acknowledging the existence of substantial oversights, Bankman-Fried refuted any allegations of fraudulent activity or intentional misappropriation of funds.
CoinDesk's revelation that Alameda held a massive quantity of FTX's exchange token, FTT, along with tweets from Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, triggered what Bankman-Fried termed a "run on FTX" and precipitated the demise of FTX approximately one year ago. As a consequence, FTX, Alameda, and their diverse subsidiaries initiated the bankruptcy proceedings.
Throughout the trial, a number of high-ranking FTX and Alameda executives testified against Bankman-Fried, alleging that they pled guilty to multiple charges at his behest but had in fact followed his instructions. But Bankman-Fried countered that he had confidence in his hand-picked lieutenants to operate the companies safely while he attended to his responsibilities as the head of the multibillion-dollar empire.
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