As prosecutors and FTX’s bankruptcy trustee comb through the wreckage of Sam Bankman-Fried’s ill-fated crypto empire, many questions remain unanswered.
Among the biggest: How did the man known and respected in the crypto industry as “SBF” commit what government officials believe was a multiyear fraud? Who else aided and abetted in the alleged scheme, where billions of dollars in customer money from his FTX exchange were looted to cover losses from an affiliated hedge fund?
Finally, and maybe most confounding to those who know Bankman-Fried: How could someone so seemingly virtuous, making heaps of money and giving lots of it away to dozens of charitable organizations, pull off what appears to be one of the most egregious financial crimes of the century?
The mystery of how Bankman-Fried went from saint to sinner may never be fully answered, of course. But it continues to stun people in places where you might expect it to, including his colleagues in the crypto industry who tell FOX Business they had no idea that FTX was built on a house of cards and run by an alleged crook.
The celebrity endorsers of FTX thought they knew enough about SBF to feel secure in pitching his exchange as a super-safe way to trade crypto. Government and regulatory officials in Washington, D.C., who leaned on SBF’s vast crypto expertise, gladly accepted his political contributions as they weighed ways to regulate the burgeoning market for digital coins.
