As the disgraced founder and former CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, is looking down the barrel of a large number of federal felonies for a series of alleged financial crimes in relation to the overall collapse of the company.
This past Monday evening, the unorganized and melancholy 30-year-old was officially arrested by authorities while still in the Bahamas after they were given word by U.S. Officials that a number of charges had been slated against Bankman-Fried and that the U.S. would soon be looking into extradition orders.
As reported by The New York Times, Bankman-Fried is going to be forced to deal with a large number of serious charges to the tune of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering.
The full list of charges is contained within a fully sealed indictment from the prosecutors for the Southern District of New York.
In a statement, U.S. Attorney Damian Willams unveiled, “Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY.”
“We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time,” added Williams.
It was reported by Reuters that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had also given their seal of approval in regard to the charges targeting Bankman-Fried.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission has separately authorized charges relating to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s violations of our securities laws, which will be filed publicly tomorrow in the Southern District of New York,” explained SEC official Gurbir Grewal in a release.
With a headquarters situated in the Bahamas, FTX was first started back in 2019 and had managed to accrue well over a million users by the time of its collapse in 2022. Users suddenly rushed out to kick off a series of full withdrawals to the sum of $6 billion in the wake of an article highlighted by CoinDesk which unveiled this past month that both branches of the cryptocurrency empire owned by Bankman-Fried, FTX and Alameda Research, had concerning overlap on their balance sheets in the form of another cryptocurrency created by FTX known as FTT. Another, rival, firm known as Binance had been planning to but FTX recently announced that it would be discharging all of its holdings placed into the coin and then fully reverse course in regards to the acquisition.
In the wake of the company collapsing, Bankman-Fried went from bragging about a net worth of over $15.6 billion to, as he puts it, having “no material wealth” in just two days’ time.