On Tuesday, federal prosecutors will begin jury selection in the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX and a former crypto billionaire accused of executing one of the most significant financial scams in U.S. history.
The trial is expected to last up to six weeks, and jury selection will begin on Tuesday.
Bankman-Fried has been charged with seven charges of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering related to his alleged exploitation of customer deposits on the FTX cryptocurrency trading platform to pay off losses at his Alameda Research hedge fund and make other expensive purchases.
He denies all charges against him. He could spend up to 110 years in prison if found guilty.
In the wake of FTX’s precipitous decline and subsequent bankruptcy filing in November 2022, Bankman-Fried resigned. Bankman-Fried was indicted on multiple counts of an investment fraud conspiracy the following month.
Bankman-Fried, speaking with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that November, denied knowing “there was any inappropriate use of consumer cash.”
Bankman-Fried is imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Brooklyn, the Metropolitan Detention Center.
A federal judge revoked Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail in August after he had spent months under house arrest at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California.
On Thursday, a federal judge in New York ruled that Bankman-Fried posed too significant of a flight risk to warrant granting him interim release from detention pending trial.
Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and the former head of his hedge fund, Alameda Research, pled guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Bloomberg estimates that Bankman-Fried’s net worth went from $16 billion to zero in a week.
According to ABC News’s sources, federal prosecutors in New York began looking into FTX’s collapse just days after the business filed for bankruptcy.
After federal prosecutors in New York filed criminal charges against Bankman-Fried in December 2022, the Royal Bahamas Police Force apprehended him in the Bahamas around a month later.
