LegalEagle explains just how deep a hole Sam Bankman-Fried has dug

Originally published at: LegalEagle explains just how deep a hole Sam Bankman-Fried has dug | Boing Boing

9 Likes

That is a deep hole. And it looks like two key players already made deals.

FTX CTO and Alameda Research CEO admit fraud, pair ‘cooperating’ with Feds

Two members of Samuel Bankman-Fried’s inner circle have pleaded guilty to defrauding equity investors in the moribund FTX cryptocurrency trading platform.

Yesterday the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it was charging Gary Wang, former CTO and co-founder of FTX, and Caroline Ellison, former CEO of sister company Alameda Research, with fraud.

This was followed by a statement from US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams that said Ellison and Wang had admitted to their roles in the frauds that contributed to the collapse of FTX. He added that they are “both cooperating” with the investigation.

[…]

7 Likes

The GQP are also going to weaponize the campaign contributions aspect of this in 2024, despite their complicity in this, because the democrats openly accepted these funds whereas the repuglicans took as dark $.

7 Likes

I was shocked at how quickly they both pled guilty, and the severity of the charges that they pled guilty to. Like, Ellison could theoretically be looking at 110 years in prison still. She won’t get that, though, because she is going to tell them EVERYTHING.

And for SBF - his whole defense has been “I was a bit of a disorganized idiot with respect to the accounting.” That has been blown up spectacularly, since she and Wang are going to testify that the fraud was intentional from the onset. SBF is in deep, deep shit, and I don’t really see a lot of incentive for the DOJ to bargain with him at all.

13 Likes

Yup. The music stopped and SBF hasn’t got a chair.

9 Likes

They get him to take 85 years in the Club Fed of his choice for pleading guilty vs 185 years for being found guilty in a 3-5 year trial and the DOJ picks his new home.

7 Likes

Nor, apparently, a pot to piss in.

5 Likes

Yeah, they were already saying he was protected and the Dem’s were ignoring his crimes because he donated to them.

Reality is - financial crimes take time to gather evidence and make charges. It has happened rather quickly in the grand scheme of things.

If he is in jail by 2024, they won’t be able to use his donations to any real effect. Though this guy has a ton of privilege and blue bloods behind him. But i think they want to make an example out of the shady crypto dealers.

3 Likes
1 Like

They were in a big hurry! The first one to help the most has the best points for reducing his / her sentence.

SBF is going to prison basically forever, which is roughly long enough.

I just can’t believe how this whole thing happened, how people got into this, and yet I have a friend who is among those who lost in something connected to this. Ah, human beings.

SBF already has flown back to the US without waiting for extradition. Bahamian prison must be pretty awful.

Yeah, this. People expect things to move fast. They don’t. Federal criminal prosecution like this moves very slowly so this is actually surprisingly fast. They are in a hurry because it’s so huge and impacted the public. The feds can only lose if they make mistakes, so they generally move very slowly and carefully so they will win. Especially in an area like this, cryptos, where things are really new and they have little previous experience and precedent to go on and they have to learn about the whole subject.

5 Likes

Re-post:

Just click on the Pluralistic link and enjoy, if that is le mot juste.

4 Likes

Or there are people in the Bahamas that he’d like to be far away from.

3 Likes

Didn’t I read that SBF was literally mid-flight, having waived his right to contest extradition, when they announced the Ellison/Wang plea agreements? I think they were worried that he would fight extradition if he had known that they had turned on him, so they kept those agreements under wraps for a few days

7 Likes

Cliff Notes version:

13 Likes

I watched that yesterday; that hole is, in fact, grave shaped.

It would seem that these plea deals, in their own way in this crooked little community, are achieving the greatest benefit for the largest number. How’s that utilitarian “effective altruism” working out for Studiously Schlubby Sam now?

2 Likes

I just realized that’s Benjamin Clementine…

The cheek bones on that man…

5 Likes

For the BBS set:

4 Likes

It really helps when the people being prosecuted are thoughtful enough to carefully organize and label their file folders by which kinds of crimes they entail.

9 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.