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Sam Bankman Fried, the central figure in the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX
As CNBC reportthe authorities in the Bahamas released a statement stating:
The Bahamas and the United States share a common interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed public trust and broken the law. While the United States pursues criminal charges against SBF individually, the Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigation into FTX’s collapse, while continuing to work with its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere.
US authorities issued a statement shortly thereafter:
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Bankman Fried, who sucked the ass League of Legends by the way, ran FTX. In just a few short years, the crypto exchange has grown from nothing to plaster its name on all sorts of sporting events and magazine covers. It was seen as very valuable because it charged customers to buy and bet on crypto, but also because Bankman-Fried was thought to be the next tech genius FTX would use to create a “super app” for finance to launch that would make crypto legit.
However, earlier this year the whole thing collapsed, partly because crypto itself is a scam, but mainly because FTX in particular was a scam. to the fact that high-level members of the exchange had a chat group called Wirefraud. Bankman-Fried, who was in the Bahamas part-time to avoid testifying before the House Financial Services Committee (FTX also moved its headquarters to the Caribbean nation last year), now faces criminal charges in two countries while his successor in charge of what’s left of FTX has previously said publicly that the company “spent $5 billion…acquiring a variety of businesses and investments, many of which may be worth only a fraction of what what they were paid for,” and that Bankman-Fried had engaged in “unacceptable management practices.”
UPDATE 8:20pm ET: The New York Times reports that Bankman-Fried will be charged by US authorities with wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and money laundering.
