Federal prosecutors believe convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried should be sent away to prison for at least 4o years.
Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York filed a lengthy sentencing memo on Friday arguing that Bankman-Fried should spend 40 to 50 years behind bars for orchestrating a multi-billion dollar fraud scheme at cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX.
“Samuel Bankman-Fried was convicted of orchestrating one of the largest financial frauds in history, and what is likely the largest fraud in the last decade. The enormous scale of the fraud at FTX is measured not just by the amount of money that was stolen, although the more-than-$8 billion of customer money that was misappropriated puts this crime in a class of cases that can be counted on one hand,” the sentencing memo begins.
“And unlike so many defendants before this Court, there are no persuasive mitigating conditions to explain his criminal conduct. His crimes are not the product of dire financial circumstances, passion or impulse, or a momentary lapse of judgment. Unlike other white-collar offenders, the losses the defendant is responsible for are not borne exclusively by sophisticated investors or extrapolated based on a stock price drop.”
A son of two Stanford professors, Bankman-Fried was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy related to misallocating billions of customer funds from FTX to fund his own investments, luxury goods, political donations, and access to A-list celebrities.
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