It was an epic Ponzi scheme that failed spectacularly. Late yesterday afternoon, fuzzy headed little feller Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on all counts.

Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty of embezzling $8billion of his clients money, with the disgraced FTX founder now facing up to 110 years in prison.

The fallen crypto king was convicted on all seven counts against him after a jury reached a verdict in less than five hours.

The 31-year-old looked shellshocked as the jurors were polled, according to a New York Daily News reporter inside the courtroom. Bankman-Fried then sat down, motionless, starring at his hands in his lap.

Quite honestly, given how everything played out, this is karma on all levels. This is a guy who really thought he could game all the systems, all the players, and get away with it. What is utterly astounding is that people whom we would’ve thought would have smart advisors bought into the crypto Ponzi scheme schtick he peddled. Tom Brady and Larry David among them. But, then again, crypto was the hot new thing that promised zillions of smackeroos with little effort. Look guys, I’ve been roped into Amway sessions and this was that on steroids. 

And, last year, it all fell apart. With a big fat KABOOM. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) got thrown into a Bahamas jail, while his former partners threw him under the bus for immunity deals. 

All was going swimmingly until one of his competitors pulled the plug as it were. 

Just days before the collapse of FTX and its sister firm, Alameda Research, the head of competitor Binance, Changpeng Zhao, announced his company would divest from Bankman-Fried’s businesses.

He made the announcement on Twitter and cited ‘recent revelations’ about the health of FTX. Those revelations were detailed in an Alameda balance sheet which was leaked days earlier and indicated the financial mess Bankman-Fried’s businesses were in.

Zhao said Binance would liquidate its FTT tokens. FTT is a cryptocurrency which was issued by FTX – and the Binance decision to sell its stake caused widespread panic among users of Bankman-Fried’s platform.

The Binance announcement triggered a run on the bank at FTX – but the company didn’t have enough money to pay investors who wanted to withdraw their assets. Customers tried to withdraw $6 billion in 72 hours.

Golly gee, I wonder why there was no money left in the bank? Perhaps because SBF and the rest at FTX were playing con man shell games?

In one potentially damning detail, Ellison described crafting seven “alternative balance sheets” for Alameda in June 2022, hiding its relationship with FTX, to present to Alameda lenders, at Bankman-Fried’s request. The real balance sheet, she said, “showed that Alameda was in a very risky position,” with about $10 billion in borrowed funds from FTX customers and $5 billion in loans to FTX executives and others, she said.

“When I started working at Alameda I don’t think I would have believed if you told me I would be sending false balance sheets to our lenders or taking customer money,” she said. “But over time it was something I felt more comfortable with.”

I’d say that was ‘cooking the books’ in high style! 

From several accounts, it seems that good ole Sam didn’t endear himself to the jury. 

The only time we caught a glimpse of the jurors was when they walked past Bankman-Fried on their way in and out of the courtroom. It was painful to see how studiously they averted their gaze from him, while he did just the opposite, staring balefully at each of them as they walked by. I couldn’t help wondering if any of them found him persuasive, or even sympathetic.

Having sat on jury trials, if you have a defendant balefully glaring at you, it’s going to be extremely tough to be sympathetic to that person. Furthermore, when faced with a pointed list of questions, instead of just answering yes or now, he would dance around the answer or quibble about how the question was phrased. I mean, “Do you deny that Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit?” should be a straightforward answer of Yes, or No. But he couldn’t even do that. 

The defense also tried to portray SBF as just some misguided fuzzy headed little math geek who was led astray. Evidently that didn’t play well with the jury. 

MORE – The charges carry a maximum sentence of over 100 years in prison. SBF will be sentenced on March 28, 2024.

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 3, 2023

Keep in mind, this was also the guy who used a significant amount of the money he made from his Ponzi scheme to bankroll politicians to the tune of over $70 million – mostly Democrats.

You can darned well bet that all those politicians REALLY don’t want to be asked about their interactions with SBF! 

Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the biggest Democrat donors in US history and is now officially one of the biggest financial frauds in US history.

Investigate all the Democrat politicians who took money from this virtue-signaling crook. pic.twitter.com/pAMS3kHg65

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) November 3, 2023

That said, Sam Bankman-Fried ran one hell of a Ponzi scheme. And, it turns out, even the most famous of people are super gullible at times. Perhaps they have learned their lesson in trusting the next person peddling a  ‘too good to be true’ scheme. 

Feature Photo Credit: FTX Bankruptcy, Common Creative license, Designed by: Ricky Redor, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)