WASHINGTON – A US jury convicted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried on all seven charges related to criminal fraud, Sputnik quoted CNBC reports.
Bankman-Fried faced seven criminal counts, including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. Federal prosecutors allege that Bankman-Fried defrauded FTX customers from the time the company started in 2019 until its bankruptcy. If convicted, he could land in prison for life.
FTX, based in the Bahamas and co-founded by Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang in 2019, had become one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. The company boasted over one million customers and was valued at US$32 billion (RM151 billion) in January 2022.
In November 2022, several newspapers alleged that FTX was a financial bubble, triggering an outbreak of withdrawals. Amid the company’s liquidity crisis, the media reports also drew the attention of US regulators to FTX. Investigators have since asserted that Bankman-Fried and his subordinates misled investors for years, using billions of clients’ dollars to make risky bets at the Alameda hedge fund, along with sinking them into personal expenses.
On November 11, 2022, FTX and over a hundred of its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware. After FTX’s collapse, an estimated one million customers were left facing billions of dollars in losses. – November 3, 2023