Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal peril deepens as his defense comes up short

Technology@lemmy.world – 64 points – 1 years ago

Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal peril deepens as his defense comes up short::undefined

He's going down for a long time, and personally I think he's an over-confident, misguided fool.

But I don't think he's a crook, in the sense that he originally set out to be dishonest from day one.

I think his well-intentioned, cocky plans turned to shit when he found himself playing a game of cryptopoly with other people's real money and landed on the "Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass 'Go'. Do not collect £200“ square.

I feel ever so slightly sorry for him. His entire life is now fucked.

I think the vast majority of criminals didn't set out to become criminals. Circumstances presented the opportunity and they took it. Hence entrapment being (technically) outlawed, lest the police and/or media create crimes for their own profitable purposes.

While his ADHD probably does provide relevant context (the grandiose ambitions, and inability to keep tabs on reality or paperwork), he knew what he was doing was criminal and buried himself in Effective Altruism to provide the self-justification. It's for the greater good, yaknow (where the greater good is getting filthy rich while promising to use the money for good, eventually, honest).

I think he feels sorry for himself but remember: he absolutely knew he was illegally misusing customer funds. And he openly talked about it in meetings with other businesses as if it was normal and fine.

So I don't feel sorry for him. He's an idiot who was given enough rope and he's certainly hung himself.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Government lawyers have marshaled damaging testimony from multiple insiders, backed by documentary evidence, depicting the former cryptocurrency mogul as the architect of a scheme to siphon billions of dollars in customer funds toward lavish personal expenses and risky investments.

Bankman-Fried’s defense team signaled in their opening statement they would seek to present him to jurors as a well-intentioned entrepreneur whose business grew more quickly than his ability to adequately guard against the risks to it.

But prosecutors may have already succeeded in convincing jurors Bankman-Fried was a manipulative swindler and bully who ordered his top deputies to carry out one of the biggest financial frauds in history, experts said.

Prosecutors’ case arguably culminated with testimony last week from Caroline Ellison, the defendant’s sometimes-girlfriend and the chief executive of his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research.

“It’s very difficult for the defense when you have a witness in the inner circle who has completely embraced that they have been involved with wrongdoing,” said Jordan Estes, a former federal prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office for Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case.

The defense lawyers may be seeking to drag out the process to give Bankman-Fried, who has been imprisoned in a Brooklyn jail since Kaplan revoked his bail in August, more time to digest the prosecution’s evidence, Silva said.

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