Sam Bankman-Fried Asks Supreme Court to Overturn FTX Fraud Conviction

In brief

• Sam Bankman-Fried asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn the fraud conviction that put him in prison for 25 years.
• Bankman-Fried’s petition calls review "urgently necessary" and follows the Second Circuit's decision upholding the conviction in June.
• He has separately applied to President Trump for a pardon, a move the Senate unanimously opposed.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the fraud conviction that put him in prison for 25 years, according to a petition reviewed by the New York Times.

The odds are long. The court grants and hears argument in about 1% of cases filed each term, by its own account, and review is discretionary.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers argue the trial court should have let him show that no FTX customer lost money. There were "always more than enough assets available to repay customers (as they now have been repaid, with substantial interest)," the petition says, calling review "urgently necessary."

Prosecutors reject that framing. The Justice Department said at sentencing that he had led a scheme to defraud FTX customers by "misappropriating billions of dollars of those customers' funds," whether or not they eventually got it back. The same case covered $1.7 billion defrauded from FTX investors and $1.3 billion from Alameda lenders, neither of them customer deposits. The repayments came through FTX's bankruptcy plan, which valued claims in dollars as of November 2022, when Bitcoin traded around $16,000.