U.S. prosecutors have reportedly initiated a full-scale criminal investigation into whether Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX and a prolific Democrat, committed a series of financial crimes that resulted in the total financial collapse of his company this past month.
As reported by The New York Times, the Investigation is focused on a full-scale examination on if Bankman-Fried “steered the prices of two interlinked currencies, TerraUSD and Luna, to benefit the entities he controlled, including FTX and Alameda Research, a hedge fund he co-founded and owned.”
Federal officials and prosecutors alike from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are also looking into if Bankman-Fried broke the law by moving the funds from the customers of FTX over to Alameda, explained the report.
The same groups were already looking into whether or not the company stood in violation of the laws on money laundering long before the company finally experienced its full public collapse, as reported by Bloomberg News.
Headquartered in the Bahamas, FTX was originally started back in 2019 and had brought in well over a million users by the tie of its collapse in 2022. All at once, Users suddenly demanded over $6 billion in total withdrawals in the wake of an article posted and published by CoinDesk which unveiled just last month that the two companies which made up the Bankman-Fried cryptocurrency empire, Alameda Research and FTX, sported major overlap on their balance sheets in regard to the cryptocurrency FTT, which FTX originally created.
The unorganized and disheveled-looking 30-year-old went from bragging about a massive $15.6 billion net worth to sporting “no material wealth” quickly over the course of roughly two days time.
When questioned near the end of last month as part of an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin from CNBC at the Dealbook Summit on whether or not he had at any point lied throughout his tenure at FTX, Bankman-Fried responded, “I don’t know of times when I lied, I think, look, there are certainly times when I was acting as a, um, as a representative, as a marketer for FTX.”
“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” exclaimed the former billionaire. “I saw it as a thriving business and I was shocked by what happened this month.”