After the arrest in the Bahamas, which was reported by Merca2.0 this Monday, December 12, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the charges against the former CEO and founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, details that had not been disclosed at the time of the arrest.
As reported this Tuesday, Bankman-Fried is accused of “defrauding investors” for having diverted “funds from FTX clients to crypto company Alameda Research while raising more than $1.8 million from investors.”
At the same time, the Attorney General’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) also announced charges against Bankman-Fried in parallel actions, according to the sec.
“We allege that Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors it was one of the safest places in cryptocurrency,” said SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.
“The alleged fraud committed by Mr. Bankman-Fried is a wake-up call to crypto platforms that they must comply with our law,” he added.
SEC: “FTX’s Bankman-Fried was part of a fraud carried out for years”
The SEC complaint says that Bankman Fried presented FTX as “a safe and responsible crypto asset trading platform”, but in reality, its founder, described as the “white knight of cryptocurrencies”, was a party involved in a “ fraud that went on for years” designed to hide from FTX investors the fact that their funds were being diverted to the Alameda hedge fund, owned by Bankman-Fried himself.
What sentence can fit Sam Bankman-Fried? The specific charges are violation of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
If found guilty, you could be barred from future trading in securities beyond as an individual, prevented from acting as a corporate officer or board member, in addition to monetary penalties.
FTX, which filed for bankruptcy in November, is based in The Bahamas.
Bankman-Fried said in different online interviews that he gave these weeks that he “did not try to commit fraud against anyone.”
The debacle of the FTX exchange, one of the most important digital asset platforms on the planet that has left at least a million investors in trouble, consolidated the drop in the price of Bitcoin and other currencies.
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