Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison

Sam Bankman-Fried, the 32-year-old former billionaire who based the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency alternate FTX, was discovered responsible in November on seven counts of fraud, embezzlement, and felony conspiracy for stealing $8 billion from FTX prospects.

Bankman-Fried was sentenced on Thursday in a Manhattan federal court docket to 25 years in jail.

Southern District of New York Choose Lewis Kaplan said that Bankman-Fried was “extraordinarily good” and “able to large accomplishments” whereas agreeing with prosecutors that Bankman-Fried “needed to be a massively, massively politically influential particular person on this nation.”

Kaplan stated that the loss quantity to the victims of Bankman-Fried’s crimes surpassed $550 million and that buyers misplaced billions.

The choose additionally discovered that Bankman-Fried dedicated witness tampering and perjury.

“Lots of people really feel actually let down, and so they have been very let down, and I’m sorry about that,” Bankman-Fried mentioned in court docket on Thursday. “I’m sorry about what occurred at each stage. And there are issues I ought to’ve performed and issues I should not have.”

Associated: Who Is FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried and What Did He Do? Everything You Need to Know About the Disgraced Crypto King

Bankman-Fried confronted a statutory most of 110 years, however prosecutors argued for 40 to 50 years in jail and Bankman-Fried’s workforce asked for much less, between 5 and 6.5 years.

^{Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Change. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg through Getty Photographs}

Different high-profile fraud circumstances have had various sentences, with Bernie Madoff notoriously receiving 150 years for a Ponzi scheme that misplaced buyers billions of {dollars}.

Marc Litt, the previous U.S. prosecutor who went towards Bernie Madoff, informed Coinage forward of the sentencing listening to that he did not suppose Bankman-Fried deserved to spend the remainder of his life behind bars.

“He is in his early 30s,” Litt said. “We do as a society imagine in rehabilitation and redemption as a lot as we discuss lots about and imagine in punishment as effectively.”