Sam Fried-Bankman,32, former CEO of the now bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has been sentenced to 25 years in a federal prison for defrauding customers and investors in what what prosecutors have called the largest fraud of the last decade, a Manhattan Court ruled Thursday evening.
Before delivering his judgement, Judge Lewis Kaplan said that there was a risk that Sam would still be in position to do something very bad in the future, describing it as not a trivial risk.
Justice Kaplan agreed with the prosecutors' claim that Bankman-Fried wanted to be a hugely politically influential person in America and this propelled him to committing his financial crimes.
Bankman-Fried's sentence of 25 years was about half of what prosecutors had asked for, but still puts him at the high end for sentence length in prominent white-collar fraud cases. Ahead of him is Bernard Madoff who was sentenced to 150 years behind bars for the $20 billion Ponzi scheme he led.
Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted on four accounts of defrauding investors while running the failed blood-testing startup Theranos, was sentenced to little over 11 years.
??ln addition to the prison sentence, Kaplan was also ordered to forfeit $ 11.02 billion however he said there would be no restitution because it would be impractical with so many victims involved.
Judge Lewis Kaplan said he would recommend to the Bureau of Prisons that Bankman-Fried be placed in a meduim-security or lower-security prison facility the bureau will find appropriate.
The judge also emphasized that the chosen prison should as possible be next to San Fransisco to enable the former's family easily visit him.
Sam Fried-Bankman, a self vested and made entrepreneur joined the world of crypyo currency inorder to mitigate his family from the poor standards of living that they had passed through the last decade.
The former CEO however had his company collapse losing upto $10 billion which saw the youthful entrepreneur get convicted last November on seven accounts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities fraud, security fraud, money laundering, defrauding the Elections Commission and committing campaign finance violations.
Despite being given a 25 year prison sentence, Bankman-Fried still faces a statutory maximum sentence of 110 years.
Bankman-Fried's lawyers has asked Justice Kaplan for a lighter sentence of about 5-6 years promising to return the money that the customers had lost but Kaplan dismissed the promise on the payment calling it misleading, logically flawed and speculative.
Before his fall from grace to grass, Forbes valued the once renowed crypto king at $24 billion in 2022. By the end of his prison sentence, Bankman-Fried is expected to 57 years though he is expected to appeal his conviction.
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