Sam Bankman-Fried appealed his fraud conviction. The appeals court read the case file. They upheld it.
This marks the first time in American legal history that a man who stole billions of dollars, lied about it under oath, and got caught remained convicted after asking nicely to not be convicted anymore. The justice system works in mysterious ways. By mysterious I mean exactly how you'd expect it to work when someone runs a Ponzi scheme with customer deposits and the receipts are all in Slack messages.
SBF's legal team argued the trial was unfair. The appeals court disagreed. Turns out when you commit fraud on a scale visible from space, judges tend to notice. His 25-year sentence stands. That's 25 years to think about effective altruism. Very effective. Extremely altruistic. Nothing says I care about humanity's future like vaporizing eight billion dollars of other people's money to pay for Bahamas real estate and Congressional lobbying.
Retail traders who lost their life savings on FTX can now rest easy knowing the man responsible will serve time. This changes nothing about their portfolio. They're still broke. But at least they're broke with closure.
The technical analysis remains unchanged. FTT still trades at zero. Customer funds still don't exist. The chart pattern formed what's known in technical circles as a complete f*cking disaster. No support levels. No resistance. Just a vertical line down followed by years of bankruptcy proceedings and cope.
SBF joins the proud tradition of financial criminals who thought they were special enough to beat the charges. They weren't. He isn't. The appeals court spent months reviewing thousands of pages of legal arguments just to say "yeah, guilty" again. American taxpayers funded a year of appellate review to confirm what everyone already knew the moment FTX collapsed.
At least Madoff had the decency to plead guilty.
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