‘THE CRYPTOCURRENCY INDUSTRY MIGHT BE NEW BUT THIS KIND OF FRAUD IS AS OLD AS TIME’
A TOP firm of Silicon Valley investors once boldly predicted that Sam Bankman-Fried could become the world’s “first trillionaire”. And yet the young business guru apparently disdained wealth. Pledging to give his money away, he famously only ever wore baggy shorts and old T-shirts, even when sharing a debating stage with heavyweights such as former American president Bill Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair.
But now the heady talk of trillions and saving the planet has imploded in one of the biggest financial frauds on record. And the sloppily dressed American cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who was hailed by the business world as “an autistic genius” and up to a year ago was gracing the covers of respected finance magazines, has a new uniform – a prison-issue one.
In an extraordinary fall from grace for a tech-world golden boy whose business empire went from $25 billion (R450bn) to virtually nothing in a matter of days, 31-year-old “SBF”, as he’s known, is facing up to 110 years behind bars.
After a month-long trial, a jury in Manhattan recently took just over four hours to find him guilty on all seven counts of stealing from customers of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.
Prosecutors told the court that Bankman-Fried portrayed himself as a high-minded altruist whose goal was to
