After the demise of his FTX crypto empire in November, Sam Bankman-Fried portrayed himself as a hapless but well-intentioned chief executive who made a series of calamitous mistakes, but never knowingly committed fraud. But a day after his arrest in the Bahamas, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed civil and criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, including that he had orchestrated a scheme to bilk equity investors out of more than $1.8 billion. The next week, prosecutors announced that two members of his inner circle had pleaded guilty to fraud charges.
It had grown into a sprawling crypto enterprise, so much so that more than 100 entities were included when FTX filed for bankruptcy. But at its heart there were two organizations that mattered most: Alameda Research, the trading venture that Bankman-Fried co-founded in 2017, and FTX Trading Ltd., a crypto exchange based in the Bahamas and founded in 2019. All told, he raised more than $1.8 billion from equity investors, the SEC said.
