Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a judge on Thursday for stealing $8 billion from customers of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded, the last step in the former billionaire wunderkind’s dramatic downfall.
Kaplan said he had found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX’s equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion.“The defendant’s assertion that FTX customers and creditors will be paid in full is misleading, it is logically flawed, it is speculative,” Kaplan said.
Addressing the judge before he was sentenced, Bankman-Fried apologised for making “bad decisions” that “failed everyone I care about”, but maintained his actions “weren’t selfish.” Nicolas Roos, a prosecutor with the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan, told the judge “the criminality here is massive in scale. It was pervasive in all aspects of the business.”