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Sam Bankman-Fried Drops Appeal to Overturn FTX Fraud Conviction
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One of Sam Bankman-Fried's final viable avenues to overturn his conviction closed Friday after a federal appeals court upheld both his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence, keeping the disgraced FTX founder behind bars.
Key facts
- The exchange, once valued at $32 billion, collapsed in November 2022 once it was exposed that the balance sheet of Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s affiliated hedge fund, was built on FTX’s own
- Judge Kaplan denied a separate Rule 33 new trial motion in April 2026, calling Bankman-Fried’s claim that witnesses had been threatened by the government “wildly conspiratorial and entirely contradicted by the record
- The court ordered an $11 billion forfeiture and three years of supervised release following Bankman-Fried’s March 2024 sentencing
- Three of Bankman-Fried’s former deputies, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang, and engineering head Nishad Singh, each pleaded guilty and testified against him
Summary
One of Sam Bankman-Fried’s last credible paths to freedom closed Friday as a federal appeals court upheld his fraud conviction and 25-year prison sentence, ruling that the case against him was, in the court’s own words, “conservatively stated, robust.” A three-judge panel of the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals handed down the 42-page opinion on June 12, rejecting every argument Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal team advanced to undo the November 2023 conviction that cemented one of the largest financial collapses in crypto history, . At the heart of the appeal was a claim that the U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan had stripped Sam Bankman-Fried of a fair defense by barring evidence that FTX held enough assets to cover customer withdrawals.