Disgraced former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried said he didn’t believe what he was doing was illegal in his first interview following his fraud sentencing last week.
‘I never thought what I was doing was illegal. But I tried to hold myself to a high standard, and I certainly didn’t meet it,” Bankman-Fried, 32, said. ABC News from his cell in Brooklyn.
Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for a massive fraud on hundreds of thousands of customers that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world’s most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency.
The judge said the defendant’s comments never conveyed “a word of remorse for the commission of terrible crimes.”
But the disgraced crypto boss has now insisted he is “of course” sorry. “It’s most of what I think about every day,” he said.
Sam Bankman-Fried was jailed for fraud last week and a judge handed him 25 years in prison.
More than 1 million customers face potential losses as a result of the sudden collapse of FTX in November 2022.
Victims say they are still owed more than $19 billion based on current cryptocurrency prices, although Bankman-Fried insisted during her sentencing that victims can get their money back.
Judge Lewis Kaplan recommended a medium-security prison for Bankman-Fried’s sentence and ordered her to pay $11 billion for stealing $8 billion from clients in an elaborate scheme.
