He was Bankman, now he's Fried
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
Come Mr. Bankman, bank me crypto-bonanza…
slow clap
Don't steal from the rich
But we can still steal from the poor right?
No problem there!
Phew! I was worried there for a second! Good to know I'll continue to face no consequences!
Steal? No, it's a clever business model where I convince you to buy dogshit because dogshit will be worth x10 next month and I'm definitely not dumping all my dogshit once you poors drive the price up.
No, it's the even more clever business model where I convince half my employees that if they just work a few extra minutes a day off the clock or work through their legally mandated lunch breaks, but still allow me to automatically deduct their pay for the break, then someday I'll notice all their hard work and reward them for it... someday.
Friendly reminder that wage theft outweighs all other robberies combined:
https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-billion-crime-against-workers/
It's encouraged!
Especially if you're rich! In fact it's much safer that way.
The Shkreli Principle
I would simply have not given real money to some company in the Bahamas in exchange for a token and a promise the token would be good for more money later. But I’m street smart like that.
They didn't make their own crypto coin.
I remember finding them in a list where they offered something like 8% interest if you deposited your bitcoins with them which was still fishy as hell. It looked like a sweet deal but I wondered how they managed to do that sustainably. I guess the answer was "they didn't".
I think you're thinking about Celsius. SBF absolutely had his own coin, and it is tantamount to the whole FTX collapse. Their competitor owned a shit load of it, it was called FTT iirc. He then just decided to tweet out that they were selling all their FTT, and then everyone started selling FTT which started a run on the token.
The company also pumped FTT and other tokens value through their hedge fund Alameda research. The man deserves every last day of sentencing.
I think you're right. I must be mixing up all these crypto-based scams.
Yet people do the same thing with literal U.S. dollars and we think nothing of it when banks lose billions gambling our money in the stock market. 🤔
Or open credit cards in their customers' names without their consent.
Or tear down whole economies with no consequences. Or take almost complete control of the housing market and turn Americans into serfs. Or...
Strange, that that fat fuck is only being held accountable because he used bitcoins to do the same things banks do on the regular. Strange indeed...
People absolutely think something about it when it happens, and hell sometimes the government even does something about it (as demonstrated in the article you linked). Just a whole lot of us would argue they don't do enough about it.
This was basically a forgone conclusion, but it ought to teach a lesson, "not your keys, not your coins". an exchange is like a public toilet you get in, do your business, and get the fuck out you don't stay in a public toilet.
Yup. I had an FTX account but I did not keep any crypto or cash there, thankfully.
I have an account with Coinbase, but I put dollars in and I pull crypto out as soon as it's available and wouldn't you believe it? I've never lost any money doing it that way.
I'm always shocked at the size of these scams. Like there have been so many notorious scams already for "coins" that...hold no intrinsic value whatsoever. And yet people keep diving into the new cryptocurrencies and putting it all on black in the hopes of winning big.
He is set to be sentenced by Judge Lewis Kaplan on March 28th of next year and faces decades in prison.
What a tease. Hurry up!
"Originally placed under house arrest, he was sent to jail in August for violations of his bail conditions, including using a VPN to watch a football game and leaking the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend"
Ok I get the diary, that's shitty...but using a VPN to watch football? That's a normal Saturday afternoon.
Not when you could be also using that vpn to communicate with people without them knowing
He also got caught sending some cryptic messages to someone saying something along the lines of getting their stories straight.
He said he had concluded that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s communication with the media and a separate attempt to contact a former FTX employee were intended to “intimidate or also to influence” witnesses in the case.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/technology/sam-bankman-fried-jail.html
When you've got bail conditions on the order of roughly a lifetime's income riding on not using a VPN, I think you can skip football for a while.
leaking the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend
August 4th
Dear diary, I have tried once again in vain to get Sam to get a decent haircut. In the movie of your life you're going to be played by Jesse Eisenberg, the least you could do is move over to his default haircut. It's only courteous.
Unless he listens not.
Can we do some more CEOs and bankers, now? Start a trend. Keep the ball rolling. Puhleeeze.
He's the scapegoat for all financial crimes of the past decade. Before him it was Madoff. The rest will continue as normal.
Try to incite an insurrection and steal an election: you'll walk away with no consequences.
Steal money from the rich: you will burn.
So, will all the conservative chuds who were convinced he was going to walk because he donates to the Democrats do any kind of follow-up on that theory?
Not your keys, not your coins
He should have committed to the personality.
He should have been playing League of Legends, bronze tier, on a laptop during the trial, while wearing cargo shorts and sipping whatever his silly energy drink was.
That is what happens when you steal from the rich.
Finally some actual good news for a change, let me break out the bubbles! 🍾🥂
While reading your comment I somehow managed to overlook the emojis initially and I just pictured you running outside with a bubble wand and a container of soapy water to celebrate.
It really is a mind fuck that I could walk out into the middle of the street in broad daylight in full view of 100 people, shoot someone in the head at point blank range, killing them and still end up with less time than this guy will most likely get so long as the person I murdered wasn't well to do financially.
I can't be the only one always making this 'Sam Bankman-Fraud' in my head when reading his name.
...to the surprise of absolutely no one.
Dunno. I distinctly remember doom and gloom that he'd get away scott free.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A New York jury delivered the verdict on November 2nd, concluding a trial that has seen Bankman-Fried defend himself against claims that he criminally mismanaged his crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research.
But prosecutors charged that the operation was a fraud “from the start.” While he promoted the exchange to investors and the public as safe and secure, Bankman-Fried’s former colleagues testified that it falsified numbers and granted secret, special privileges to Alameda — including a $65 billion line of credit and a flag that let Alameda’s balance dip into the negative as it illicitly borrowed FTX customer funds.
The FTX empire collapsed after a November 2022 Coindesk article — published precisely one year before the jury’s decision — revealed the secret blurring of funds and Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao announced he would pull out of the exchange.
Originally placed under house arrest, he was sent to jail in August for violations of his bail conditions, including using a VPN to watch a football game and leaking the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend — former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, who pleaded guilty to federal charges and testified against him in trial — to The New York Times.
He denied directly supervising the damning code updates that allowed Alameda to spend FTX funds and said he had not participated in trading or questioned employees about billions of missing dollars.
His testimony was contradicted by Ellison, his former roommates Adam Yedidia and Gary Wang (the cofounder of FTX), and family friend Nishad Singh; all had worked under Bankman-Fried and later cooperated with prosecutors.
The original article contains 451 words, the summary contains 261 words. Saved 42%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
No shit