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‘Enforcement 40’ for 2020
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Join the Securities Litigation and Enforcement Group on LinkedInThe SBF Case Was Easy – Bloomberg
… And for a normal person who does not love financial complexity and have a soft spot for fraud, this case was very very very very very very very simple. Obviously a lot of people — not just Bankman-Fried but also the prosecutors, journalists, etc. — have some incentive to make it seem complicated. But […]
FTX Founder SBF Found Guilty of Fraud: Crypto Needs More Regulation – Bloomberg
It’s tempting to treat FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction as a morality play, replete with the familiar elements of a hubristic protagonist’s rise and fall. That’s understandable, but the bigger lesson here is not that startup founders should be humbler, true though that may be. It’s that regulation is better than criminal law at preventing […]
Bankman-Fried’s Pre-Trial Antics Haunt Him Before Sentencing
Former federal prosecutors predict the fallen FTX co-founder will receive at least 20 years in prison. That would be a harsher sentence than defendants in some other recent high-profile white-collar cases, including Elizabeth Holmes, who received a prison term just over 11 years last November for defrauding Theranos Inc. investors. At the high end, federal […]
Swift SBF Conviction Vindicates Prosecution ‘Need for Speed’
Bankman-Fried’s case was a high-pressure test of Williams’s trumpeted aim to pursue white collar prosecutions selectively and swiftly. In part, the defense team banked on prosecutors’ speed undermining their ability to put on a strong, trial-ready case. Thursday’s verdict sends a different message to the financial world. “This case moved at lightning speed,” Williams said […]
Sam Bankman-Fried and the SEC – WSJ
Mr. Gensler has since spun Mr. Bankman-Fried’s fraud as a cautionary tale of the crypto “wild West.” The SEC chief claims crypto currencies are securities—ergo, exchanges and token developers must submit to agency regulation. But a federal judge this year disagreed, and Congress hasn’t given the SEC authority to regulate crypto. Mr. Gensler has tried […]
Sam Bankman-Fried guilty verdict: I was there in the courtroom. I think I know why he did it.
I caught his eye a couple times but couldn’t get a read. However, I think his emptiness of expression helped me to make some sense of all this. Sam Bankman-Fried, known as a math nerd and effective altruist, saw the world in probabilities and calculations, going so far as to figure out he had a […]
After Sam Bankman-Fried Guilty Verdict, What’s Next for Caroline Ellison, Others – Bloomberg
Ellison, Wang and Singh will likely get no or very little prison time for their testimony, several criminal defense lawyers who’ve followed the case said. That compares to the decades in prison Bankman-Fried possibly faces when he’s sentenced in March. *** If they do get some jail time, it will likely be relatively short, and […]
Statement Of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams On The Conviction Of Samuel Bankman-Fried | United States Department of Justice
“Sam Bankman-Fried perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in American history – a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the King of Crypto – but while the cryptocurrency industry might be new and the players like Sam Bankman-Fried might be new, this kind of corruption is as old as time. This case has always […]
Sam Bankman-Fried Is Found Guilty of 7 Counts of Fraud and Conspiracy – The New York Times
Sam Bankman-Fried, the tousle-haired mogul who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was convicted on Thursday of seven charges of fraud and conspiracy after a monthlong trial that laid bare the rampant hubris and risk-taking across the crypto industry. Mr. Bankman-Fried became a symbol of crypto’s excesses last year when FTX collapsed and he was charged […]
Silicon Valley Shrugs Off Sam Bankman-Fried’s Trial – The New York Times
All of which is to say that, despite the involvement of many Silicon Valley insiders in FTX, people in tech were not outwardly obsessed over the ins and outs of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial, which ended when he was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy on Thursday. They barely mustered a shrug. *** […]