Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for orchestrating the $8 billion fraud that led to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
He was the CEO of FTX, which suddenly went bankrupt in November 2022 – leaving millions of users freezing their accounts and unable to make withdrawals.
After the sentence was read out in court, the judge asked Bankman-Fried if he would like the terms read to him.
The 32-year-old simply replied “no thanks”.
The prison sentence is not the maximum the prosecutors had asked for (they were pushing for up to 50 years), but it is certainly not what Bankman-Fried’s legal team, which had suggested five to 6.5 years, had hoped for.
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Sam Bankman-Fried said Thursday that FTX’s clients “could have been repaid.
There were enough assets.” He has made a similar argument in court filings leading up to the trial that the bankrupt exchange had enough cryptocurrencies that it could have repaid its account holders, who lost nearly $8 billion when it closed.
Earlier in the hearing, the judge rejected that argument, saying that Bankman-Fried was still committing fraud by using his customers’ assets for his own purposes.