U.S. federal authorities on Thursday charged the founder of ill-fated cryptocurrency platform FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, with four new crimes related to the theft of money from his clients’ deposits to support the operations of the company and its associated investment fund, Alameda Research. ; make charitable contributions and political donations and get rich.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is investigating the platform’s meltdown, amended the original indictment to include one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three counts electronic fraud against FTX customers, committed between 2019 and 2022. .
According to the legal document, Bankman-Fried, who now faces a total of 12 criminal charges, committed the multimillion-dollar fraud through a series of schemes that allowed him, through Alameda, “to access and steal deposits undetected.”
He also used the money for buyouts and venture capital investments and to make “tens of millions of dollars in illegal contributions” to Democrats and Republicans in an effort to pass favorable legislation for FTX, sometimes at the name of two platform leaders to hide where they came from. and evade federal election laws.
“To prevent certain contributions from being made public in his name, Bankman-Fried conspired and made certain political contributions on behalf of two other FTX executives,” ultimately choosing to make the donation to a person identified by a pseudonym on the legal document.
The prosecution cites an example in 2022 when Bankman-Fried and “others agreed that he and his partners should contribute at least $1 million to a political action super committee (PAC) that supported a candidate he was running for a seat in the United States”. United States Congress and appeared to be affiliated with pro-LGBTQ issues.
The money used for the contributions came from Alameda’s bank accounts, where the money deposited by its customers arrived.
Specifically, Bankman-Fried and his partners made more than 300 political donations worth tens of millions of dollars “that were illegal because they were made through bogus donors or with corporate funds. , often allowing him to evade credit limits,” according to the indictment.
Last December, Sam Bankman-Fried was charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan with eight counts, mostly related to fraud or conspiracy to commit fraud, to which he pleaded not guilty.
According to these charges, the defendant and his associates “knowingly and intentionally devised a scheme and scheme to defraud, obtain money and property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises”, and “agreed with others to deceive FTX.com customers by embezzling its deposits and using them to pay Alameda Research’s expenses and debts.”
Alameda Research was the investment firm that Bankman-Fried himself started in 2017, where he allegedly used billions of dollars from unwitting FTX clients to carry out risky trades.