Bankman-Fried's grift ran its course but he's not special. There are many powerful people just like him doing almost the same thing he is accused of doing. Oftentimes, they've been given permission to enrich themselves and other elites while everyone else loses. They only get in trouble when it gets inconvenient or far too obvious.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the former head of the cryptocurrency exchange company FTX, was arrested by Bahamian authorities on December 12th, one month after the company collapsed. He has been denied bail but surely his high-powered attorney is working on that. Bankman-Fried used money from investors and from his own FTX crypto tokens (FTT) to prop up Alameda Research, another one of his crypto ventures. He’s also at the center of a "dark money" operation that probably broke U.S. federal law with respect to financial contributions to the Democrat and Republican parties. To sum it up, he’s both a swindler and an illegal financier. Allegedly. Bankman is currently facing serious charges in the U.S. that could land him in prison for life. When all is said and done, the crypto fraudster could be found responsible for running one of the largest financial scams in American history. Reports are saying that his shady operations may be responsible for roughly $7 billion worth of losses.
Will he actually get punished though? Before his arrest, Bankman-Fried had been very talkative with the press. That’s rather curious, I think. One would expect that a person at the center of such a major controversy would be more cautious, fearful, and reticent. But Bankman has been far from any of those things since his house of cards came crashing down. In fact, the Fried Bankman made quite the media tour since the fall of FTX, and he appeared to be quite flippant about the entire ordeal. In addition, the press has been generally treating him like a fallen hero, or a victim of his own success, rather than a nefarious schemer. In their quasi-puff pieces about him, the media has used words such as “wunderkind” and “genius” to describe Bankman.
Since November, Bankman-Fried has been granted the gracious opportunity to give his side of the story to George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, to Kelsey Piper at Vox, to the BBC, and to influential leaders from the world of politics, business and culture at the DealBook Summit. It’s almost as if he’s being preemptively shielded from suffering the worst consequences of his actions. In every single media appearance that he has had, the MIT-grad and erstwhile “King of Crypto” has claimed total ignorance. He has maintained that he was unaware of any potential fraud related to FTX and Alameda and that he had no clue about clients’ funds being misused. Bankman’s consistent excuse has been that he was not savvy enough to properly manage his multi-billion dollar companies. That’s funny. Apparently, Bankman has a very good sense of humor. Will his lawyers run with that story?
Bankman-Fried is a guy who received about $2 billion in investments from major financial powerhouses like Sequoia Capital, Iconiq Capital, Third Point Ventures, BlackRock, and many more. It's pretty obvious that these firms were using him to gain access to the cryptocurrency market. The scam runs far deeper than the Fried Bankman. Due to the fact that the cryptocurrency arena is decentralized and largely unregulated, it has proven difficult for mainstream financial entities to enter and manipulate it. But with Bankman-Fried at the helm of FTX, giant investment firms finally got their meal ticket. They were just hoping that he would last long enough for them to obtain a firm footing in crypto. Bankman was just a cheat code for them to do that and. I'm sure they knew that their new shiny plaything would break sooner rather than later. I highly doubt that they expected that a guy who plays League of Legends while discussing multi-billion dollar deals would be a long-term player in the financial game.
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