Crime

Caroline Ellison, the former girlfriend of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was secretly recorded as she blamed her ex for a fateful decision to use customer funds to plug financial holes in the crypto giant’s failed hedge fund, according to court documents.

The recording of Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, the hedge fund through which Bankman-Fried allegedly used FTX customer funds to make risky bets, was made by an Alameda employee during an all-hands meeting on Nov. 9.

Sammy is in trouble.

Sam Bankman-Fried used stolen customer funds to make over $100million in campaign contributions ahead of the 2022 midterms, prosecutors have claimed.

The new indictment, filed Monday, charges the 31-year-old with seven counts of conspiracy and fraud over the collapse of the exchange.

He has previously pleaded not guilty. Mark Botnick, a spokesman for Bankman-Fried, declined to comment.

Inmates inside the prison where disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is to be held during his trial have previously been stuck in freezing cells with limited power for a week.

The Metropolitan Detention Center houses more than 1,600 inmates and is situated near the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

As well as new inmate Bankman-Fried, the prison had previously held high profile individuals including R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Martin Shkreli.

NEW YORK (AP) — FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sent to jail Friday to await trial after a bail hearing for the fallen cryptocurrency wiz left a judge convinced that he had repeatedly tried to influence witnesses against him.

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered Bankman-Fried’s bail revoked after prosecutors said he’d tried to harass a key witness in his fraud case last month when he showed a journalist her private writings and in January when he reached out to the general counsel for FTX with an encrypted communication.

The NYTimes article on the Bail Revocation fleshes out the situation a bit more as it should given their involvement.

Evidently Judges look upon witness tampering as a “Bad Thing.” In another pleasant surprise it appears the Illegal Campaign Contribution charges recently dropped due to an extradition technicality are able to be resurrected. Looks like Sammy was expendable after all.

This is the NYTimes article that got SBF’s bail revoked – Inside the Private Writings of Caroline Ellison, Star Witness in the FTX Case

Three months before the cryptocurrency market imploded last year, Caroline Ellison, the 27-year-old chief executive of the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research, was racked with self-doubt.

“I have been feeling pretty unhappy and overwhelmed with my job,” Ms. Ellison wrote in a Google document in February 2022. She added: “At the end of the day I can’t wait to go home and turn off my phone and have a drink and get away from it all.”

Ms. Ellison had a lot on her mind. She did not think that she was well suited to running Alameda or particularly decisive as a leader, she wrote in another Google document. She was also going through a breakup with Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire entrepreneur who had founded Alameda and then FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. They had dated on and off, and Ms. Ellison worried about “making things weird” and “causing drama.”

Sotheby’s is being sued by investors over an auction of more than 100 images of cartoon monkeys.

The 279-year-old auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit alongside celebrities including Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber and Madonna who promoted Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a series of 10,000 collectible, digital monkeys.

This scam was so blatant it’s hard to believe it could be pulled off.