Live updates: Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty in fraud trial

The jury in Sam Bankman Fried's criminal fraud case found him guilty of all charges.

Bankman-Fried (31), was charged with

mismanaging customer funds

FTX is a crypto exchange that allows users to store their coins in a secure environment.

Riches for the family

He was found guilty

Seven counts of fraud

He could be sentenced to prison for the rest of his days.

The verdict ends a year-long saga which took Bankman to an apartment penthouse in the Bahamas, then to a cell shared in one of

New York's most notorious detention centers

.

Investors and regulators have been watching the trial closely for any signs of fraud.

potential larger crackdown

The crypto market is largely unregulated.

The sentencing date has been set at March 28, 2024.

11 Min ago

Samantha Delouya, CNN

US Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York listens to a press conference held at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., on the 27th of January. Carolyn Kaster/AP

US Attorney Damian Williams, in remarks outside Manhattan's courthouse on Thursday, praised the jury for convicting Sam Bankman Fried, saying that the government "has no patience" with fraud and corruption.

He said: "These players, like Sam Bankman Fried, might be new but this type of fraud, corruption is old."

Williams said that this case should be a warning to "every single fraudster who believes that they are untouchable or that their crimes will be too complex for us catch".

"Those people should stop and think about it." He said that if they didn't stop, we would have enough handcuffs to cover them all.

42 minutes ago

Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of FTX and convicted of seven counts fraud, isn't giving up after his conviction.

Mark Cohen, the lead attorney, said in a press release that he respected the jury's verdict. "But we're very disappointed by the outcome." "Mr. Bankman-Fried will continue to fight his charges with vigor."

40 minutes ago

Sabrina Souza, CNN

Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried sat together in the second row and hugged one another as they listened to the count.

Bankman's face was barely visible as he buried his head into his lap.

Fried wrapped her arm around her spouse and squeezed his shoulder as he did to her.

She shook her head and pressed her palms to her cheeks while listening to the verdict. Her son was in her direct gaze, her eyes lowered and frowning.

Both parents kept their heads down when Bankman-Fried first stood up to address the jury. Bankman kept his head down for the majority of the time.

Bankman-Fried looked shell-shocked after the verdict was announced. He didn't turn to look at his parents until the exit was near. His mother then put her face on his shoulder as she pressed her hand against her heart.

57 minutes ago

US District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan has announced that former FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman, convicted of the crime, will be sentenced to prison on March 28, 2020.

Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, will return to Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center, where he has been detained since August.

The MDC is far from Bankman Fried's Bahamas compound or his parents' Palo Alto neighborhood, where he had been placed under house arrest after his arrest in December.

The MDC is located on the waterfront industrial area of Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. It has earned a reputation for being a great place to work.

One of the worst prisons in America

Politicians and activists have hailed the facility as a sign of a failing criminal justice system.

A person familiar with the situation told CNN that Bankman-Fried is in the same cell as other prominent detainees. This includes the former President of Honduras who was charged with cocaine trafficking last year.

Banker-Fried also has a 'friendly relationship' with

Genaro Garcia Luna

This person stated that the former director of Mexico's FBI is currently awaiting sentencing on drug trafficking charges.

Observers noticed a change in Bankman-Fried’s appearance as soon as his trial started. He appeared to be losing weight, and his wild hair was gone. It had been shorn in a tight crew cut.

The person confirmed that the haircut was provided by a MDC resident.

58 minutes ago

Sam Bankman Fried, the former CEO of FTX, was surrounded by a group of high-ranking witnesses who were all against him. His defense was thrown into disarray from the beginning.

His defense attorney appeared to stumble during the trial when cross-examining these witnesses.

In criminal cases, lawyers usually advise their clients not to testify as they could be subjected to damaging cross-examination by prosecutors. But several legal experts agreed that Bankman Fried's case was a rare exception. He was left with no one to stand up to the former business partners. Bankman-Fried's career was built on high-stakes risks, such as taking the stand.

Howard Fischer, former SEC lawyer and partner of Moses Singer's law firm, said that Bankman-Fried had an excessive appetite for and tolerance for risks.

"Testifying takes a lot of effort." Fischer stated that it is important to not only get the facts right but also learn how to answer questions and deal with the stress of a cross-examination. "Ideally, you would practice for months before going on the witness stand."

Bankman-Fried’s trial preparation was significantly complicated after Judge Lewis Kaplan revoked the defendant's bail in August after prosecutors claimed that the defendant had been charged with a crime.

The New York Times received leaked documents about Caroline Ellison's ex-girlfriend.

After other incidents of alleged witness interference, that was the final straw for Kaplan. He remanded Bankman Fried to a federal prison in Brooklyn, New York where his access was limited to lawyers.

55 minutes ago

The jury read the guilty verdict and Sam Bankman-Fried's face was gloomy. He stood with his head bowed, shaking and shaking his hands as his lawyer spoke to him after the jury had been released.

His parents were a few feet behind him. Bankman-Fried smiled back at his parents as he was led out of the room.

Joe Bankman put his arm around the shoulders of his wife. Barbara Fried wept as their son left court.

1 hr. 6 min.

During the four-week trial of former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman Fried, a number of people he had once considered to be his closest confidantes began testifying against him. They included his friends from math camp, MIT, and his trusted business advisor, Caroline Ellison, who was 28 years old.

Ellison provided the most damning evidence in Bankman-Fried's case.

Who testified over the course of three days for the prosecution?

Ellison, who was both CEO of Alameda Research and Bankman Fried's romantic partner of two years, was in a unique position to comment on the inner workings of the Alameda and FTX executive circle, which included many executives living together in a luxury apartment worth $30 million in the Bahamas.

Ellison's emotional testimony at times provided a narrative in which almost every decision made at Alameda or FTX was a result of Bankman-Fried who founded both companies and owned the majority. Ellison's response when asked to whom she owed her criminal and other actions was often a variation of the phrase 'Sam'.

1 hr and 8 min ago

Alameda Research was a crypto-trading house similar to a hedge fund that Bankman-Fried founded in 2017. It played a key role in FTX’s demise.

According to Wang's testimony, almost as soon as FTX launched in 2019, the former CEO Sam Bankman Fried ordered co-founder Gary Wang and Chief Technology officer Nishad Singh, to modify the platform's software to give Alameda - as a client on the exchange - certain'special priviledges' other customers did not have.

As part of a plea agreement with the government, both Wang and Singh admitted to financial crimes.

Wang said that Alameda's executives had access to a virtually limitless line of credit, which they could use at any time. Alameda’s main trading account also received an 'allow-negative' flag. This meant that it could incur a balance of 0 without repercussion. Wang testified this was a privilege granted to no other FTX customers.

1 hr and 14 min ago

Sam Bankman Fried, the former CEO of FTX, was found guilty on Monday. The verdict comes a year since the crypto exchange went into a death spiral which sparked a panic within the trillion-dollar industry and exposed an estimated one million customers to potential losses. Before its collapse, this exchange had attracted millions users, as well as a group of A-list supporters, including Tom Brady and Gisele.

FTX was founded by Bankman Fried in 2019. It marketed itself as a simple and safe way to trade cryptocurrencies – digital assets whose value is based largely upon a collective expectation for their future applications, which remain murky.

FTX became a popular crypto portal in the early 2020s when interest rates were at zero, and there were millions of home-bound amateur investors. By 2022 FTX had Super Bowl ads running and its name plastered on the Miami Heat arena.

FTX filed for bankruptcy on 11 November 2022, after a panicked run by customers sparked by a document leaked that suggested irregular financial transactions between FTX & another company owned by Bankman-Fried.

But unlike bank depositors, FTX customers had no federal insurance to compensate them if the cash ran out. Despite FTX's public statements that it did not invest or move customers' deposits in any way whatsoever, Bankman-Fried’s other firm secretly siphoned deposits to repay their own lenders, underwrite executive luxury lifestyles, bet on crypto markets, and funnel millions in US political campaigns.