Sam Bankman-Fried should spend between 40 and 50 years in prison for stealing $8 billion from customers of his now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange, prosecutors said on Friday. In November, a jury found Bankman-Fried, 32, guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said "thousands of everyday people" including residents of war-torn and unstable countries had entrusted their nest eggs to FTX, Reuters reports. "Even now Bankman-Fried refuses to admit what he did was wrong," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. "His life in recent years has been one of unmatched greed and hubris; of ambition and rationalization; and courting risk and gambling repeatedly with other people's money." They are seeking $11 billion in forfeiture, to account for losses FTX's investors and lenders.
The former billionaire's lawyer Marc Mukasey told U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan that a 5-1/4 to 6-1/2 year prison term would be appropriate. Mukasey said FTX clients would get most of their money back, and that Bankman-Fried did not set out to steal. Sentencing is set for March 28 in Manhattan federal court. Bankman-Fried plans to appeal his conviction and sentence. Bankman-Fried is the son of two Stanford Law School professors. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bankman-Fried worked on Wall Street before riding a boom in the values of digital assets such as bitcoin to a net worth Forbes magazine once estimated at $26 billion.
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