US to seize $17.9m of crypto connected with Sam Bankman-Fried
The Department of Justice has filed to seize millions worth of cryptocurrency in connection with Sam Bankman-Fried, ex-CEO of the FTX crypto exchange.
The complaint, which was filed on Tuesday (Nov. 12), seeks to take possession of more than $17.9 million of crypto in a Binance account. Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange company.
The DOJ says the account is linked to Bankman-Fried (also known as his initials SBF) allegedly bribing Chinese officials in December 2023. It holds Solana, Cardano, Ripple, Internet Computer and Avalanche cryptocurrencies. The account was worth around $8.6 million at the end of 2023, but is now estimated to contain $17.9 million.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s history of fraudBankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year jail sentence for fraud at FTX. Customers’ money was used to make risky investments on crypto, creating a $10 billion black hole in the business.
“I never thought that what I was doing was illegal,” he wrote after he was sentenced earlier this year. “But I tried to hold myself to a high standard, and I certainly didn’t meet that standard.”
Now the DOJ claims that Bankman-Fried transferred $40 million USDT (Tether cryptocurrency) from FTX’s sister company Alameda Research to bribe Chinese officials. According to the document, this was sent so the officials would release around $1 billion in frozen crypto assets.
Once he knew that the assets had been unfrozen, Bankman-Fried reportedly “authorized additional payments to be made in the amount of tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency in order to complete the bribe”.
The document continues: “Thereafter, individuals known and unknown laundered the Bribe Payment through multiple additional private wallets, in order to conceal or disguise the nature, the location, the source, the ownership or the control of the proceeds.”
It was also announced this week that a film about Bankman-Fried is set to be written by Lena Dunham, based on Michael Lewis’ book about him.
Featured image: Midjourney
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