Sam Bankman-Fried was founder and face of the crypto exchange FTX, which collapsed last month, wiping out billions in customer assets and leaving evidence of financial backdoors and other shenanigans. He's been on an apology tour since, ignoring lawyers' advice to stop tweeting and instead presenting himself as a smol genius bean who tried to do his best by everyone. Bankman-Fried had established a reputation for himself (and his company) among gullible pundits by promoting a popsicle-stick philosophy called "Effective Altruism", which boils down to Victorian-era utilitarianism wrapped in corporate PR language and wrapping an ethical void absent any human values beyond what might be detected by an AI analyzing word frequencies in LinkedIn blogs.
Anyway, they arrested the bastard in the Bahamas and he'll be on his way here by Christmas. Given that the consensus among legal experts was that investigators would take their time because of the difficulty in proving criminal intent, their sudden velocity is remarkable. Perhaps the discovery of a secret mailing list named "wirefraud" helped with that.
Before his arrest was announced, Bankman-Fried had been expected to testify virtually before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday, but his attorneys told CNBC that he will not appear. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who oversees that committee, said she was "surprised" at his arrest and disappointed that Congress would not be able to hear from him on Tuesday.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that the federal government anticipated moving to "unseal the indictment in the morning." CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin reported that the charges against Bankman-Fried include wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and money laundering
