Sentencing Day Arrives for FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried

SBF team argues for 5-6 year sentence, cite FTX customers’ money

While prosecutors are requesting that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried spend 40 to 50 years in prison for his crimes, the defense team is urging the judge to consider a sentence that’s roughly 90% shorter.

Bankman-Fried’s fate will be announced in Manhattan on Thursday morning by Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the monthlong trial in November. Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven charges tied to the collapse of crypto exchange FTX and the roughly $10 billion of customer deposits that went missing.

The hope for Bankman-Fried’s team is that Kaplan takes into account the increased likelihood that FTX customers will be able to recoup most, if not all, of the money they lost when the exchange spiraled into bankruptcy in 2022.

Judge in Coinbase case endorses SEC’s crypto regulation-by-enforcement strategy

In a ruling, opens new tab on Tuesday that allows the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to proceed with its case against crypto exchange Coinbase, a Manhattan federal judge threw a bucket of ice-cold water on the crypto industry’s criticism of the SEC’s strategy of setting policy through enforcement actions.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of Manhattan held that because at least some crypto trades on the Coinbase platform met the longstanding definition of an investment contract, the SEC can move ahead with claims that Coinbase improperly operated as a securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. She also said the SEC adequately alleged that Coinbase sold unregistered securities through its “staking program,” in which customers received rewards for allowing Coinbase to pool their assets.

Anonymous Audit Firm Sues PCAOB to Block ‘Excessively Intrusive and Burdensome’ Investigative Demand

An audit firm subject to a PCAOB investigation over the auditing of crypto assets on March 27, 2024, sued the board in US district court to halt what it framed as an ‘excessively intrusive and burdensome’ document demand.

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The complaint describes the plaintiff as a registered public accounting firm that has received six accounting board demands (ABDs) from the PCAOB “requiring them to produce tens of thousands of pages of documents in an onerous format not even required by the SEC, and to sit for seven full days of formal, on-the-record sworn testimony so far.”

It added that the PCAOB’s Division of Enforcement and Investigations (DEI)’s most recent demand seeks “audit documentation and information from an entirely different year’s audit than what had consumed the preceding two-and-one-half years of investigation.”

Sam Bankman-Fried Prison Sentence Shaped by FTX Crypto Fraud

But Bankman-Fried’s case revealed a version of the former billionaire that’s more disturbing—and especially troubling for an industry bent on sweeping the whole episode under the beanbag. According to an examination of trial testimony, thousands of pages of exhibits and interviews with insiders, Bankman-Fried’s rise appeared to rely on tricking customers, investors and banks almost from the very beginning. His genius, if one can call it that, was recognizing that the mania around crypto would enable him to get away with totally disregarding the rules.

Imagine crypto trading as a video game. Bankman-Fried certainly did. His gaming addiction was a running theme throughout Lewis’ bestselling book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon and was well known even to his own investors, who caught him playing League of Legends during a pitch meeting. Helping himself to FTX customer money was like turning on invincible mode. It let him gamble like he’d never lose and spend like he’d never go broke. His race to billionaire status was so fast that one tech blogger compared it to a speedrun of The Legend of Zelda.

Chemours Faces DOJ, SEC Accounting Probe Amid Shakeup at Top

ndustrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd.’s US unit had been hit by a The US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice are probing Chemours Co. after the chemical company put three of its top executives on leave amid an investigation into its accounting practices.

“Chemours is cooperating with requests for information by the SEC and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York concerning the results of the Audit Committee Internal Review and the Company’s SEC filings in respect of that review,” the company said in its 10-K published after market close on Wednesday.