The founder of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges was sentenced to 25 years

The founder of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced by a court in the USA to 25 years in prison. Earlier, he was found guilty of organizing financial fraud, as a result of which he stole 8 billion dollars from clients.

The court ordered the crypto-investor to compensate clients in the amount of 11 billion dollars, The Washington Post reports. The court declared that the accused “could not accept responsibility for the disaster he created.”

“Mr. Bankman-Fried says that mistakes were made … but he has not expressed a word of remorse for committing terrible crimes,” said federal judge Lewis Kaplan, who handed down the sentence.

Founded in 2019, the FTX exchange was estimated at $32 billion by November 2022. The company’s value dropped to zero a few days after the publication of a journalistic investigation, which stated that the assets of Bankman-Fried’s second major business mainly consist of cryptocurrency issued by his own stock exchange.

According to the jury’s verdict, the businessman transferred the deposits of FTX clients in the form of loans to his investment fund Alameda Research, which used these funds to pay his creditors and issued loans to the businessman himself, who used them for stock market speculation. He himself stated at the court that he did not know that he was committing illegal actions.