Crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in prison – E24

The prosecution submitted a claim of between 40 and 50 years behind bars. Now crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried has the answer.

Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in prison, according to the news agency Reuters just before 5pm Norwegian time. Both CNN and BBC report the same.

The defenders had previously submitted that the 32-year-old should be sentenced to between 5 years and three months and 6 and a half years in prison.

In November last year, he was found guilty on all seven charges, which included fraud and conspiracy. Bankman-Fried was indicted after the crypto exchange FTX collapsed in November 2022.

Judge Lewis Kaplan in the federal court in Manhattan in New York, emphasizes that there is no substantial danger that Bankman-Fried will engage in similar criminal activity again.

– That this man is in a position where he can do something like this again is not very high, said the judge before the sentence was read out, according to CNN.

According to the same channel, Judge Kaplan simultaneously orders the confiscation of values ​​of up to 11.2 billion dollars, or a staggering 121 billion Norwegian kroner.

According to the judge, these values ​​can be used to repay the victims in the fraud case.

Apologized

Bankman-Fried should not have shown any remorse earlier in the trial, according to several media.

The man who was declared a genius and a billionaire before he turned 30 replied “no, I didn’t” when his lawyer asked if he defrauded or stole money from the customers of the crypto exchange FTX.

However, the tone was a little different in court on Thursday, according to The Guardian. The newspaper writes that Bankman-Fried apologized to the victims for the first time.

– We could pay back what was lost. There were enough funds available. The is enough funds available, the now-convicted crypto entrepreneur said, according to the newspaper.

At the time of the collapse, FTX was one of the largest and most high-profile crypto companies. It had major ripple effects in the crypto market and affected investors worldwide.

Collapsed

The course of the case was somewhat unclear for a long time. But eventually it emerged that FTX had lent several billion dollars to Alameda Research, an investment company owned by Bankman-Fried.

The money was spent on risky investments. When customers rushed to FTX to withdraw their money, they were gone. It happened after news that Bankman-Fried had used its own cryptocurrency FTT as collateral for loans, according to The Guardian.

Shortly afterwards, Chinese Changpeng Zao, then CEO of the crypto exchange Binance, announced that he would sell FTT for 500 million dollars. It caused the course to collapse.

Must have worked on the appeal

The regulatory authority US Commodities Futures Trading Commission has estimated that Bankman-Fried’s customers were defrauded of more than 8 billion dollars.

Bankman-Fried herself has been working on an appeal of her sentence from a federal detention center in Brooklyn after her conviction, according to The New York Times.

His defense attorneys have argued that a lengthy prison sentence would pose a significant risk to him, including because he has autism, according to The Wall Street Journal.