Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in federal prison

Originally Published: 28 MAR 24 06:00 ET

Updated: 28 MAR 24 12:06 ET

By Lauren del Valle and Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to 25 years in federal prison for defrauding customers and investors in his failed crypto exchange FTX, a Manhattan court ruled Thursday.

Before announcing the sentence, Judge Lewis Kaplan said there was a risk “that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it’s not a trivial risk.”

Kaplan agreed with prosecutors’ claim that Bankman-Fried “wanted to be a hugely, hugely politically influential person in this country,” and that this propelled his financial crimes.

Bankman-Fried’s sentence of 25 years was about half of what prosecutors had asked for, but still puts him at the high end for sentence length in prominent white-collar fraud cases. Ahead of him is Bernard Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years behind bars for the $20 billion Ponzi scheme he led. He died around 12 years into his sentence. Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted on four charges of defrauding investors while running the failed blood-testing startup Theranos, was sentenced to a little over 11 years.

In addition to the prison sentence, Kaplan also ordered a forfeiture of $11.2 billion.

However, he said there would be no restitution because it would “impractical” in this case, with so many victims.

Kaplan recommended a medium-security or lower-security facility that is as close as possible to the San Fransisco area so Bankman-Fried’s family can visit him.

This story is developing and will be updated.

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