FTX co-founder and crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison and ordered to repay more than $11 billion for his conviction on fraud and money laundering charges, a Manhattan court ruled Thursday.
Bankman-Fried, 32, faced a maximum sentence of more than 100 years for the seven crimes he was convicted of in November by a New York jury. These include several counts of fraud and money laundering.
For this, prosecutors demanded between 40 and 50 years. Meanwhile, the young man’s lawyers asked for five years and three months to six and a half years, as they assured that he intends to return the defrauded money to those affected.
The final decision has been made by Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the month-long trial in November and who also, in another case, oversaw the cases between writer E. Jean Carroll and former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Bankman-Fried, who at the age of 30 was already a millionaire thanks to the cryptocurrency platform FTX, has addressed the court directly on Thursday to say that he regrets what happened and that there were things he “should have done and things he shouldn’t have done.”
The young man has also admitted that he made “a number of bad decisions” as FTX’s CEO and has even praised his former business partners, such as co-founder Gary Wang and his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, who testified against him. Together, they all “built something beautiful,” Bankman-Fried has said.
Millions of people have been affected by the fraud scheme and the consequent bankruptcy of FTX and other companies founded by Bankman-Fried. The company has stated that it expects to settle and refund customers “in full.”
Judge Kaplan said Thursday that he found the amount of losses for victims of Bankman-Fried’s crimes to exceed $550 million, the upper end of the range given by federal sentencing guidelines.
FTX, which was one of the world’s largest crypto platforms and was once valued at $32 billion, plunged in November 2022 after many users rushed to withdraw their funds amid reports that questioned the company’s solvency.
In just one year, Sam Bankman-Fried went from posing on the front pages of the U.S. media as a “child prodigy” of the crypto world to being handcuffed in the news for being accused of federal fraud and money laundering charges.
image: galexs
[newsletter_form lists="1"]
