Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty, CNN reports.
Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on Thursday for his role in the collapse of crypto exchange FTX.
After 15 days of testimony and about four and a half hours of deliberations, jurors returned a verdict that found him guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.
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Bankman-Fried looked sunken as the verdict was read out. After the jury was released, he stood, head bowed and shaking as his lawyer spoke in his ear. A few feet behind him, his parents stood watching. As Bankman-Fried was escorted out of the room, he turned back and smiled at his parents. His father, Joe Bankman, put his arm around his mother’s shoulders. As their son left the room, Barbara Fried broke down in tears.
Bankman-Fried was found guilty of stealing billions of dollars from accounts belonging to customers of his once-high-flying crypto exchange FTX. He was also found guilty of defrauding lenders to FTX’s sister company, the hedge fund Alameda Research, which held FTX customer funds in a bank account.
During his trial, Bankman-Fried said he learned in 2020 that FTX customer funds were held by Alameda but he did not take action to safeguard them.
When he later discovered in the fall of 2022 that Alameda owed $8 billion to FTX, no one was fired.
Other charges Bankman-Fried was found guilty of include defrauding investors in FTX and a money-laundering charge.
The verdict caps a yearlong saga that took the 31-year-old Bankman-Fried from a billionaire living in a luxury apartment in the Bahamas to a defendant in one of the biggest white-collar crime cases since Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme that fell apart in 2009.
FTX was once one of the most trusted names in crypto. The trial has been closely watched by regulators, investors and the crypto community for signs of a potential larger crackdown on the largely unregulated crypto market.
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