Bankrupt FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is charged with foreign bribery

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been accused of bribing Chinese officials $40 million to gain access to frozen crypto assets worth over $1 billion. The founder is facing multiple charges after the crypto exchange company faced the equivalent of a bank run in November 2022 and quickly filed for bankruptcy thereafter.

The federal indictment alleged that Bankman-Fried managed to bribe Chinese officials and eventually managed to unblock the trading accounts of Almeda Research, a sister company of FTX, which held crypto worth over a billion dollars. Bankman-Fried is charged under the Foreign Corrupt Business Practice Act, a federal law aimed at prosecuting companies that pay bribes to operate their businesses in foreign jurisdictions.

Sam Bankman-Fried is currently facing charges in 13 criminal courts. Previous charges include securities fraud, money laundering, campaign finance violations and operating an unlicensed money transfer business.

FTX (short for Future Exchange) was a cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang. In 2017, Bankman-Fried established Alameda Research as a crypto trading company. In November 2022, reports surfaced that FTX was funneling money to its sister arm, Alameda Research. Subsequently, the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance liquidated its $580 million stake in FTX, which further led depositors to rush to withdraw their investments. Unable to obtain financial assistance, the company eventually declared bankruptcy.

Major cryptocurrencies are trading as follows as of 9am IST, March 29, 2023:

Bitcoin: $27,393.43

+1.71%

Ethereum: $1,779.26
+4.01%

Tether: $1.00
+0.01%

USD coin: $0.9997
+0.03%

BNB: $313.27
+1.57%

XRP: $0.5327
+12.40%

Dogecoin: $0.07401
+2.58%

Gimbal: $0.376
+9.37%

Polygon: $1.11
+5.69%

Peas: $6.10
+5.04%

Tron: $0.0643
+1.20%

Litecoin: $89.70
+3.53%

Shibu Inu: $0.00001031
-2.46%

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