Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
— as judge rips him as power-obsessed scammer
A Manhattan judge ripped Sam Bankman-Fried as a remorseless scammer obsessed with political power as he sentenced the dethroned crypto king to 25 years in prison Thursday — five months after he was found guilty of stealing more than $8 billion from customers of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Judge Lewis Kaplan said the 32-year-old former billionaire owner of the popular FTX trading platform “presented himself as the good guy” in favor of “appropriate regulation of the crypto industry” — but that his friendly persona was just an “act.”
“He did it because he wanted to be a hugely, hugely politically influential person in this country,” Kaplan said inside a packed federal courtroom in Manhattan. The judge then blasted the fallen mogul as having an “apparent lack of any real remorse.”
Bankman-Fried was also ordered to pay back more than $11 billion to FTX’s users, investors and lenders — but it was unclear Thursday how much of that sum he’d be able to pay.
The judge delivered the sentence — which was less than one-fourth of the 110-year max that Bankman-Fried faced and well under the 40-to-50 years prosecutors suggested — after the disgraced tech whiz delivered a 20-minute, meandering mea culpa to the court.
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