Convicted cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried received a sentence of 25 years in prison on Thursday after being found guilty on seven charges related to the 2022 collapse of FTX, a crypto exchange founded by SBF, in which some $10 billion worth of customer deposits vanished.
The sentence Bankman-Friend received is quite a bit less than the 40-50 years prosecutors sought but well above the shorter stint SBF's lawyers argued was appropriate.
Bankman-Fried's legal team said that their client should only do five or six years in prison, arguing that the FTX customers Bankman-Fried defrauded could be able to get their missing billions back through the bankruptcy process underway at the crypto exchange founded by SBF.
According to CNBC:
Lawyers representing the bankruptcy estate of FTX told a judge in Delaware last month that they expect to fully repay customers and creditors with legitimate claims. Bankruptcy attorney Andrew Dietderich, who works with FTX’s new leadership team, said “there is still a great amount of work and risk” ahead in getting all the money back to clients, but that the team has a “strategy to achieve it.”
Now 32 years old, Thursday's sentence will, on paper at least, leave the shaggy-haired former king of crypto behind bars until after his 57th birthday.
At his sentencing hearing, Bankman-Fried stood "with his hands clasped" and told the judge "he was haunted every day by what he had thrown away," according to The Wall Street Journal. "I was responsible for FTX, and its collapse is on me," he told the court before saying he was "sorry" for letting people down.
Bankman-Fried used his customers' money to pay for his luxurious life and fund his political agenda, as Mia reported of the "woke, broke, baby-faced crypto whiz kid" last November:
Runner-up to liberal mega-donor George Soros, the now-bankrupt founder of FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, was the second-largest contributor to Democrat-affiliated political action committees (PACs) and organizations during the 2022 midterm campaigns. It wasn't chump change; we're talking tens of millions that Bankman-Fried funneled to progressive causes.
This is a developing story and may be updated.