Prosecutors call FTX ‘massive’ fraud scheme
Sam Bankman-Fried’s lies, prosecutors say, stretched back to the very beginning.
From the founding of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019, Bankman-Fried engaged in widespread fraud, federal authorities charged Tuesday, and used his customers’ deposits to finance his political activities, buy lavish real estate and invest in other companies.
A series of civil and criminal charges filed against Bankman-Fried in the Southern District of New York say he repeatedly lied to customers, investors and lenders, and misled them about the structure of his business empire and how he handled the billions of dollars in funds that crypto users deposited in his exchange.
In a 13-page criminal indictment, Bankman-Fried was charged with eight counts, including wire fraud on customers and lenders and conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate campaign finance laws.
A parallel civil complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission laid out a detailed narrative of FTX’s collapse, claiming that for years Bankman-Fried had illegally used customer deposits to fund his business and political activities.
As FTX collapsed, the SEC said, investors were kept in the dark about what was going on. Federal prosecutors said lenders were kept in the dark.
And hundreds of thousands of FTX customers around the world were kept in the dark, too — only to find out Bankman-Fried’s claims their money was safe were false.
Bankman-Fried, 30, was arrested Monday evening at his home in the Bahamas, where FTX was based. On Tuesday, he appeared in court in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas.
“Bankman-Fried was orchestrating a massive, yearslong fraud, diverting billions of dollars of the trading platform’s customer funds for his own personal benefit and to help grow his crypto empire,” the SEC said in its civil complaint.
Federal prosecutors will need to extradite Bankman-Fried from the Bahamas, a process that can be drawn out if he is inclined to fight returning to the United States to face trial in federal court.