Crypto fraudster Bankman-Fried loses federal appeal while seeking Trump pardon

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto billionaire who was convicted of fraud in 2023, lost a decision to overturn his conviction and 25-year prison sentence on Friday, Reuters reported.

A New York jury found Bankman-Fried guilty of two counts of wire fraud and five counts of conspiracy in November 2023 for his actions while running FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that declared bankruptcy in 2022 after being valued at more than $26 billion.

Bankman-Fried pleaded guilty before a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, which unanimously rejected her plea on Friday, calling the evidence against her “unequivocal, overwhelming,” according to Reuters.

“While he assured customers, investors and regulators that FTX’s customer funds were safe, at the same time he operated FTX as his personal bank, using customer funds for residences, political contributions, and investments,” District Judge Barrington Parker told Reuters.

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Bankman-Fried became an avid political activist in the years leading up to his conviction.

While the one-time crypto magnate seems to favor Democrats with his donations — his $40 million donation to Democrats in the 2022 midterms made him the party’s second-largest donor behind George Soros — he poured a lot of money into Republican coffers as well.

According to Michael Lewis’s book about the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto-billionaire tested whether a large payout could persuade former president Donald Trump not to run for president again. Now, Sam Bankman-Fried has signed what amounts to a presidential pardon from Trump.

Bankman-Fried made this point in an interview with Susan Li of Fox Business, who asked her if she wanted a pardon.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried spoke to FOX Business from prison, saying he would “be interested” in a pardon from President Donald Trump. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images; Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images / Getty Images)

“Definitely,” he told Li, adding, “It would be obvious, you know, ultimately to the president, not to me.”

Bankman-Fried has also maintained that she is innocent of defrauding or stealing from her clients.

CONVICTED FTX FOUNDER SAM BANKMAN-FRIED DEFENDS INNOCENT IN SPECIAL PRISON HEARING

“I didn’t steal users’ money either,” he told Li. “The clients have now been refunded 170% or more of their deposits. It’s one of the very few cases where the stage was over-compounded, where the clients were more than made whole. And yet there was, you know, not just a criminal investigation, but a prosecution. And, you know, a number of years of imprisonment.[s].”

From right, Terrence A. Duffy, CEO of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX US Derivatives, Christopher Edmonds, chief development officer of the Intercontinental Exchange, and Christopher Perkins, president of CoinFund, examine (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images/Getty Images)

FTX’s bankruptcy estate confirmed to FOX Business that clients are being paid in full and some are getting profits of up to 118%. However, those estimates are calculated using crypto prices as of November 2022, which is roughly the bottom of the cryptocurrency market.

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Federal prosecutors alleged during the trial that Bankman-Fried systematically diverted billions of dollars in customer deposits to cover trading losses at his private hedge fund, Alameda Research, orchestrating what they described as historic financial fraud.

Fox Business’ Kristen Altus and Susan Li contributed to this report.