“I never had the intention of taking anyone’s money”: Sam Bankman-Fried, the former boss of FTX, confides after his conviction

This is his first speech since his conviction at the end of March. In a letter sent last weekend to ABC News from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, the former boss of the FTX crypto exchange Sam Bankman-Fried, sanctioned with a 25-year prison sentence, expressed regret over the management of his business. “That’s the main thing I think about every day,” he said. After FTX collapsed in November 2022, resulting in an $8 billion loss for its 9 million customers, Sam Bankman-Fried resigned before the new owner filed for bankruptcy.

Found guilty in November 2023 of seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, the former crypto tycoon says he “never intended to harm anyone or take anyone’s money.” Admitting to “bad decisions,” he “never thought that what (he) was doing was illegal.” While Judge Lewis Kaplan considered that he never had “a word of remorse for committing terrible crimes,” SBF claims “of course” he did. “Haunted, every day, by what was lost,” the businessman takes full “responsibility for what happened to the business”: “When you’re responsible, it doesn’t matter why things go wrong. »

“I would give anything to be able to help repair even some of the damage. I do what I can from prison, but it is deeply frustrating not to be able to do more,” Sam Bankman-Fried also proclaims. Who, having “seen the despair, frustration and feeling of betrayal of thousands of customers”, demands that they be “paid in full, at the current price.” And this, despite the announcement from FTX liquidators: clients should recover their funds, but on the value of the cryptocurrency at the end of 2022. If the 32-year-old man or one of his employees had remained in his position as CEO, they would, according to him, have been “repaid a long time ago”.