Sam Bankman-Fried co-founded the FTX crypto exchange in 2019 and quickly built it into the world’s second most popular place to trade digital currency. It collapsed almost as quickly — by the fall of 2022, it was bankrupt. Prosecutors soon charged Bankman-Fried with misappropriating billions of dollars in FTX customer deposits. He acknowledged making mistakes but blamed some of the wrongdoing on other executives at his companies and said he never intended to defraud anyone. A jury convicted him of two counts of wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud.
