Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty of fraud

He was Bankman, now he's Fried

Come Mr. Bankman, bank me crypto-bonanza…
slow clap

Don't steal from the rich

But we can still steal from the poor right?
- No problem there!
- Steal? No, it's a clever business model where I convince you to buy dogshit because dogshit will be worth x10 next month and I'm definitely not dumping all my dogshit once you poors drive the price up.
- It's encouraged!
- Minor fines may be involved and a stern "that's a no-no!" from a regulatory organization.
- Especially if you're rich! In fact it's much safer that way.
- Of course! Society isn't going crazy.
The Shkreli Principle

I would simply have not given real money to some company in the Bahamas in exchange for a token and a promise the token would be good for more money later. But I’m street smart like that.

They didn't make their own crypto coin.
I remember finding them in a list where they offered something like 8% interest if you deposited your bitcoins with them which was still fishy as hell. It looked like a sweet deal but I wondered how they managed to do that sustainably. I guess the answer was "they didn't".
- I think you're thinking about Celsius. SBF absolutely had his own coin, and it is tantamount to the whole FTX collapse. Their competitor owned a shit load of it, it was called FTT iirc. He then just decided to tweet out that they were selling all their FTT, and then everyone started selling FTT which started a run on the token.
  The company also pumped FTT and other tokens value through their hedge fund Alameda research. The man deserves every last day of sentencing.
- Yet people do the same thing with literal U.S. dollars and we think nothing of it when banks lose billions gambling our money in the stock market. 🤔
  Or open credit cards in their customers' names without their consent.
  Or tear down whole economies with no consequences. Or take almost complete control of the housing market and turn Americans into serfs. Or...
  Strange, that that fat fuck is only being held accountable because he used bitcoins to do the same things banks do on the regular. Strange indeed...

This was basically a forgone conclusion, but it ought to teach a lesson, "not your keys, not your coins". an exchange is like a public toilet you get in, do your business, and get the fuck out you don't stay in a public toilet.

- They are appealing to human nature because it is absolutely human nature to gamble in the hopes of winning big and these scammers take serious advantage of that. Something for nothing is always extremely interesting.
Yup. I had an FTX account but I did not keep any crypto or cash there, thankfully.
- I have an account with Coinbase, but I put dollars in and I pull crypto out as soon as it's available and wouldn't you believe it? I've never lost any money doing it that way.

He is set to be sentenced by Judge Lewis Kaplan on March 28th of next year and faces decades in prison.

What a tease. Hurry up!

There is another trial on additional charges before then.

"Originally placed under house arrest, he was sent to jail in August for violations of his bail conditions, including using a VPN to watch a football game and leaking the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend"

Ok I get the diary, that's shitty...but using a VPN to watch football? That's a normal Saturday afternoon.

Not when you could be also using that vpn to communicate with people without them knowing
He also got caught sending some cryptic messages to someone saying something along the lines of getting their stories straight.
He said he had concluded that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s communication with the media and a separate attempt to contact a former FTX employee were intended to “intimidate or also to influence” witnesses in the case.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/technology/sam-bankman-fried-jail.html
When you've got bail conditions on the order of roughly a lifetime's income riding on not using a VPN, I think you can skip football for a while.
leaking the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend
August 4th
Dear diary, I have tried once again in vain to get Sam to get a decent haircut. In the movie of your life you're going to be played by Jesse Eisenberg, the least you could do is move over to his default haircut. It's only courteous.
Unless he listens not.
He can claim it was to watch football, doesn't mean it was.

Can we do some more CEOs and bankers, now? Start a trend. Keep the ball rolling. Puhleeeze.

- And they'll continue to commit fraud until they can't kick the can anymore. Then they kick us because they have everything anyway.

Try to incite an insurrection and steal an election: you'll walk away with no consequences.

Steal money from the rich: you will burn.

See Anna Sorokin, or Elizabeth Holmes.
Or for the elders among us, Nick Leeson. He didn't even steal the money, he just fucked up.
- Has Holmes even gone to jail yet? She got knocked up twice to dodge prison
Trump's still on trial. I'm sure he'll go to jail for something or other.
- He won't.
There it is.

So, will all the conservative chuds who were convinced he was going to walk because he donates to the Democrats do any kind of follow-up on that theory?

"We got him, despite the DEMONRATS"
- Demonrats sounds like either a biker gang or a punk rock band lol

Not your keys, not your coins

He should have committed to the personality.

He should have been playing League of Legends, bronze tier, on a laptop during the trial, while wearing cargo shorts and sipping whatever his silly energy drink was.

Definitely. I'm sure the court would be happy to throw in a contempt charge on top of his sentence for fraud.

That is what happens when you steal from the rich.

Finally some actual good news for a change, let me break out the bubbles! 🍾🥂

While reading your comment I somehow managed to overlook the emojis initially and I just pictured you running outside with a bubble wand and a container of soapy water to celebrate.

So, so guilty.

Sam Bad-Bankman Fraud

I can't be the only one always making this 'Sam Bankman-Fraud' in my head when reading his name.

I read is as "Fried" (as it Kentucky Fried Chicken).

It really is a mind fuck that I could walk out into the middle of the street in broad daylight in full view of 100 people, shoot someone in the head at point blank range, killing them and still end up with less time than this guy will most likely get so long as the person I murdered wasn't well to do financially.

A lot of people are using the cheat code of being a cop and then doing 0 time.
Do you really believe that the typical murderer serves less time than the typical securities fraudster?

...to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Dunno. I distinctly remember doom and gloom that he'd get away scott free.

No shit

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A New York jury delivered the verdict on November 2nd, concluding a trial that has seen Bankman-Fried defend himself against claims that he criminally mismanaged his crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research.

But prosecutors charged that the operation was a fraud “from the start.” While he promoted the exchange to investors and the public as safe and secure, Bankman-Fried’s former colleagues testified that it falsified numbers and granted secret, special privileges to Alameda — including a $65 billion line of credit and a flag that let Alameda’s balance dip into the negative as it illicitly borrowed FTX customer funds.

The FTX empire collapsed after a November 2022 Coindesk article — published precisely one year before the jury’s decision — revealed the secret blurring of funds and Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao announced he would pull out of the exchange.

Originally placed under house arrest, he was sent to jail in August for violations of his bail conditions, including using a VPN to watch a football game and leaking the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend — former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, who pleaded guilty to federal charges and testified against him in trial — to The New York Times.

He denied directly supervising the damning code updates that allowed Alameda to spend FTX funds and said he had not participated in trading or questioned employees about billions of missing dollars.

His testimony was contradicted by Ellison, his former roommates Adam Yedidia and Gary Wang (the cofounder of FTX), and family friend Nishad Singh; all had worked under Bankman-Fried and later cooperated with prosecutors.

The original article contains 451 words, the summary contains 261 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Should have stolen from poor people and gotten involved with the big banks instead of going against them. Be a free man with a golden parachute today if he had.

looks like shit

W

Are these Vegans in the room with you?
- If you look back in the .world news feed, you'll find a couple of months ago that dumbass fucking Bankman-Fried was complaining that there were no vegan options for him in jail, and he was forced, forced I tell you, to subsist on peanut butter sandwiches. And vegans came out in full force in defense of that fucking jelly roll. Others were arguing about it in there... I remember reading the comments and losing a little bit of my faith in humanity.
  I had hoped they were actually being serious about it and weren't just a bunch of paid shills or concern trolls or whatever exploiting the situation to upset others. I honestly don't know which would have been worse, but I now feel deprived, as if they actually were serious about the vegan thing, they would've come up here bitching and I could have laughed at them.

Every news about this guy always has the same title, for almost a year

This is the first time he’s ever been convicted of a crime, not sure what you mean?