[ad_1]
Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges he looted billions of dollars in customer deposits to his bankrupt crypto currency exchange FTX.
Bankman-Fried, 30, has been under house arrest in his parents’ California home on a $250 million bond. He was extradited to the United States from the Bahamas in late December to face charges he plundered customer accounts to use for risky hedge fund bets, a lavish lifestyle and millions in political donations.
Before his arrest last month, Bankman-Fried had said publicly that he never intended to defraud anyone.
Earlier on Tuesday, the one-time crypto wunderkind revealed that his parents have been bombarded with threats since his arrest. He sought to have the identities of two co-sponsors of his massive bond remain anonymous, according to a court filing.
“Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents have received a steady stream of threatening correspondence, including communications expressing a desire that they suffer physical harm,” read the filing from Bankman-Fried’s lawyer. “There is serious cause for concern that the two additional sureties would face similar intrusions on their privacy as well as threats and harassment if their names appear unredacted on their bonds or their identities are otherwise publicly disclosed.”
The filing stated that federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who are handling the fraud case against Bankman-Fried, had no objection to such a move.
Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on Dec. 13 and was extradited to New York to face charges a little over a week later. While being transported, prosecutors revealed that two of Bankman-Fried’s top associates, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, had pleaded guilty in the case and had agreed to cooperate with authorities.
Bankman-Fried’s arrest came just over a month after the implosion of his crypto currency exchange FTX, which caused billions of dollars in customer deposits to vanish. The firm filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11 when Bankman-Fried was ousted from the company he’d co-founded in 2019.
Prosecutors say the company was a fraud from the very beginning, with Bankman-Fried allegedly funneling customer deposits into the accounts of his family office trading firm, Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried treated the money as his personal piggy bank, prosecutors have said, using it to back risky bets and to finance the lavish lifestyle for him and a small cohort of executives.
[ad_2]
Source link
