Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty of fraud

jeffw@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 740 points –
Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty of fraud
theverge.com
93

Don't steal from the rich

But we can still steal from the poor right?

No problem there!

Phew! I was worried there for a second! Good to know I'll continue to face no consequences!

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.

No, it's the even more clever business model where I convince half my employees that if they just work a few extra minutes a day off the clock or work through their legally mandated lunch breaks, but still allow me to automatically deduct their pay for the break, then someday I'll notice all their hard work and reward them for it... someday.

Friendly reminder that wage theft outweighs all other robberies combined:

https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-billion-crime-against-workers/

Minor fines may be involved and a stern "that's a no-no!" from a regulatory organization.

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.

I think you're right. I must be mixing up all these crypto-based scams.

It's almost like crypto itself is one giant Ponzi scheme?! Forget I said that. It's tHe FutUrE

Also, be glad you didn't put money in Celsius. I have a friend that did for the interest that they were offering. It worked... Til it didn't. He lost $50k.

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...

People absolutely think something about it when it happens, and hell sometimes the government even does something about it (as demonstrated in the article you linked). Just a whole lot of us would argue they don't do enough about it.

I'm not actually defending Sam Bankman-Fried. I'm pointing out the obvious hypocrisy in the system. Both that fat fuck and actual bank execs need to waste away in prison cells.

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.

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.

I don't mess with crypto but why would people leave it in FTX/Coinbase? is it cheaper for trades and stuff?

because most people are using crypto incorrectly as a speculative asset where it's meant to be used as a currency. What people should be doing is buying it and then taking it and spending it. Whereas what they are doing is they are buying it, hoping that the price goes up in terms of dollars or euros or yen or whatever and selling it. Those sorts are not what I would consider real crypto people. They are just using it as some sort of stock. What real crypto people want to see is the government and central banks no longer able to fuck people out of their money through inflation, taxation, and manipulation of the money supply. The good cryptos All have a completely predictable money supply. Hard-coded into their core so you always know how much there will be at any given time.

I tried buying something using crypto on Coin base back in the day. Signed up, transferred $100 into Eth, had to wait two or three days for Coinbase to do their due diligence or whatever, and then it was down 50% by the time I could use it. (I think China banned crypto or something?) I just pulled out my credit card and bought the item directly, and never touched crypto again

The problem is that the item you were buying was priced in terms of fiat currency, such as dollars or euros. When items are priced in crypto, then they don't fluctuate, because, for example, one bitcoin will always be one bitcoin, no matter what. Whereas a dollar will not always be a dollar. A dollar in 1914 would have bought a lot more than a dollar does today. The three good monies are silver, gold, and crypto. The first two can only be manipulated by going into space and getting asteroids to get more, and the third can only be manipulated by worldwide community consensus, which is really hard to obtain.

But with a hard coded money supply, you cannot control inflation. The inflation won't be in terms of dollars, it'll be in the number of coins required to buy whatever, you know like how inflation doesn't make euros less valuable versus dollars, it makes euros less valuable versus bread

First off, let me say that I am no monetary expert. Now, with that said, once something like Bitcoin hits its 21 million cap, there will never be any more Bitcoin. So wouldnt thar be deflationary due to lost coins, etc? Now in this case it can be argued this is a bad thing because miners need fees to secure the network. If there are no more coins being released to secure the network, then fees will have to make up for it, and that could drive the cost to transact up, which would be a bad thing. Something like Monero takes another route where 0.6 new Monero will always be released, but that the inflation is asymptotically 0 because that new 0.6 Monero makes up less and less of the entire supply over time. This would allow for the replacement of lost coins as well so that one coin doesn't become infinitely valuable.

Now imagine central bank halving their value to reduce inflation. Its the same thing but you don't have any control over the money you earned spending the time you did to earn that money. If there was an alternate currency which is not controlled by any government or inflation of a single government that crypto currency.

My brother-in-law is obsessed with cryptocurrency. He keeps going on about a fiat and how it isn't a fiat, or something. I don't listen to that 90% of the things he says, so I'm not that clear.

He's also a massive anti-vaxxer.

It's like being an idiot in one area of your life predisposes you to be an idiot in another era of your life. Who knew?

I'm always shocked at the size of these scams. Like there have been so many notorious scams already for "coins" that...hold no intrinsic value whatsoever. And yet people keep diving into the new cryptocurrencies and putting it all on black in the hopes of winning big.

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.

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!

1 more...

"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.

Most CEOs and bankers know they can't screw each other. It's only okay to screw the little guys.

At least Bernie got away with his scam for decades. He was an old old man who had lived a full life by the time he went to prison. Sammy? Not so much

3 more...

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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?