Sam Bankman-Fried accused of sending a $40 million crypto bribe to Chinese officials

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Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the col­lapsed FTX cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange, has been charged with yet anoth­er crime: bribery. In an indict­ment filed on Tues­day, the Depart­ment of Jus­tice claims Bankman-Fried “autho­rized and direct­ed a bribe of at least $40 mil­lion to one or more Chi­nese gov­ern­ment officials.”

The bribe was an alleged attempt to get Chi­nese offi­cials to unfreeze some of the accounts asso­ci­at­ed with FTX’s sis­ter com­pa­ny, Alame­da, which con­tained over $1 bil­lion in cryp­tocur­ren­cy. Accord­ing to the DOJ, all of this occurred in Novem­ber 2021, at a time when Bankman-Fried want­ed access to the funds in order to assist Alame­da “in obtain­ing and retain­ing busi­ness.” The indict­ment states Bankman-Fried exhaust­ed “numer­ous meth­ods” when try­ing to unfreeze the funds before alleged­ly resort­ing to a bribe that ulti­mate­ly result­ed in the funds get­ting unlocked.

“After con­fir­ma­tion that the Accounts were unfrozen, Bankman-Fried autho­rized the trans­fer of addi­tion­al tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in cryp­tocur­ren­cy to com­plete the bribe,” the indict­ment reads. “Alame­da used the unfrozen cryp­tocur­ren­cy to fund addi­tion­al Alame­da trad­ing activity.”

In addi­tion to this lat­est charge of bribery, Bankman-Fried’s new bail con­di­tions bar the cryp­to founder from using a smart­phone. His new non-smart­phone won’t have access to the inter­net or Sig­nal, which Bankman-Fried alleged­ly attempt­ed to con­tact his col­leagues with while out on bail. Bankman-Fried will also have to turn in his exist­ing lap­top, which “will be con­fig­ured to allow access” only to spe­cif­ic web­sites, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, and Net­flix — mean­ing no more League of Leg­ends.

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