Sam Bankman-Fried has been accused of engineering “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history” as US prosecutors filed criminal charges against the founder of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
In an indictment unsealed on Tuesday, the US Department of Justice charged Bankman-Fried with eight counts including conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers and lenders, money laundering and violations of campaign finance laws. Bankman-Fried, who was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday, faces years in prison if convicted.
The charges pointed to a long-running scheme to misappropriate the deposits of exchange customers to pay debts and expenses of Bankman-Fried’s private trading firm Alameda Research and to make investments. The conspiracy ran from 2019 — the year he founded FTX — until its collapse last month, according to the indictment.