By: Bella Hood

Wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, otherwise known as “SBF”, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion on March 28, 2024. A federal court convicted SBF in November on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit commodities and securities fraud.

The former 32-year-old billionaire is the son of two Stanford law professors. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked at Jane Street Capital, a quantitative trading firm. FTX, an abbreviation of “Futures Exchange” was founded by SBF in 2018 as a centralized cryptocurrency exchange supporting futures for all major cryptocurrencies. At his height, SBF’s net worth was said to be around $26 billion. For reference, Beyonce’s is roughly $800 million. SBF also founded his own hedge fund, Alameda Research, which would go on to be a key player in his scheme to defraud investors.

In November 2022, FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (handled by Sullivan & Cromwell) which requires the reorganization of the company’s assets and liabilities but does not kill the company outright. Even so, FTX is dead for all intents and purposes and announced in January it would not reopen its exchange and would liquidate all assets.

A New York jury found SBF guilty of all seven criminal counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud against FTX customers. Against Alameda Research lenders the court found SBF guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud against FTX investors, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Congress enacted the wire fraud statute in 1952 as an extension of the 1872 mail fraud statute. In 1987, the Supreme Court broadly held in McNally v. United States that the statute applied to any act “designed to defraud by representations as to the past or present, or suggestions and promises as to the future.” Securities fraud refers to illegal activities that involve the deception of investors or the manipulation of financial markets. The Securities and Exchange Commission is the primary securities regulator in the U.S.

Commodities fraud is the sale or purported sale of a commodity through illegal means and often goes hand in hand with securities fraud. Since 2019, the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has entered six corporate resolutions relating to violations of the commodities laws with a combined total monetary amount of over $1 billion. Money laundering is the act of disguising financial assets so they can be used without detection of the illegal activity that produced them.

Bernie Madoff, orchestrator of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, was convicted of 11 federal felony counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, and money laundering, which earned him a sentence of 150 years in prison.  His net assets in 2009 prior to sentencing totaled at least $823 million. It is estimated that he stole as much as $65 billion. In comparison, SBF was found to have cheated customers and investors of at least $10 billion. Jeffrey Skilling, the failed CEO of Enron at the time of its implosion, was convicted of an impressive 19 crimes, including 12 counts of securities fraud. Skilling was ultimately sentenced to 14 years in prison and ordered to pay $42 million in restitution to victims of the fraud. The energy and commodities trading holding company held $63.4 billion in assets before its stocks tanked.

Though a long line of financial fraudsters paved the way for SBF, the use of cryptocurrency to achieve such scale was largely unheard of. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency created and is younger than SBF himself, having launched in 2009. The public should expect to see the federal government go after an increasing number of crypto king copycats in the future in an attempt to strengthen guardrails on the industry.

In September of 2023, a cofounder of OneCoin, a now defunct cryptocurrency exchange, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for creating and promoting a phony cryptocurrency. Just this past month, OneCoin’s former head of legal and compliance, Irina Dilkinska was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to forfeit over $111 million. Dilkinska pled guilty in November of 2023 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. March of 2024 was a busy month for the U.S. government because a jury also found the founder of Terraform Labs, a Singapore-based blockchain protocol and payment platform, liable for defrauding investors in 2021. Binance is yet another example of a cryptocurrency exchange riddled with fraud. In November of 2023 (sensing a trend?), the company and founder pleaded guilty to money laundering and other crimes, costing the company over $4 billion.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen set the tone when she told the industry: “Let me be clear, we’re also sending a message to the virtual currency industry more broadly – today and for the future, the virtual currency exchanges and financial technology firms wish to realize the tremendous benefits of being part of the US financial system they must play by the rules. If they do not, the US government will take action.” SBF’s sentence serves as a harbinger of the U.S. government’s approach to cryptocurrency fraud and the harsh punishments to come.