Sam Bankman-Fried, the embattled FTX founder was on Tuesday, charged with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy and wire fraud for allegedly misusing billions of dollars in customers’ funds before the spectacular collapse of his cryptocurrency empire.
An indictment detailing the charges was unsealed by a federal court judge in Manhattan Tuesday morning following weeks of feverish speculation the 30-year-old would end up in handcuffs after his company — one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world — ended up in bankruptcy last month, Bloomberg reported.
The report said the indictment alleges that Bankman-Fried agreed with others “to defraud customers of FTX.com by misappropriating those customers’ deposits and using those deposits to pay expenses and debts of Alameda Research.”