The Sam Bankman-Fried trial is afoot, and it is not going well for him. The head of the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange service FTX (and once-potential presidential candidate) has been raked over the coals as he attempts to deflect charges of fraud. An accomplice and alleged former ex has even ratted him out, with receipts (while dragging his unkempt looks, of course). His defense team doesn’t seem to be helping, as one of their moves was compared by prosecutors to one of the silliest movies of the ‘90s.
Among the allegations against Bankman-Fried is that he and his team siphoned billions of dollars from FTX customer accounts, then used them to pay for losses at his sister company, hedge fun Alameda Research, in the wake of cryptocurrency’s crash last year. Per NBC News, Bankman-Fried’s attorneys claimed that this wasn’t the same as stealing.
“If you find that FTX customers, after depositing funds with FTX, received a credit to transact on the FTX exchange and therefore received the right to withdraw an equivalent amount of funds at a later time upon request, that is insufficient to establish that they were deprived of property,” the defense team wrote in a note to the jury.
For one thing, though, customers weren’t able to retrieve their funds as both FTX and Alamadea were imploding. Prosecutors argued as much, calling their claim “untethered to the facts of the case,” adding that a “credit to obtain funds at a later date, if such funds are ultimately available, is clearly not the same, or as valuable, as the money or property itself.”
They also added a footnote, which read, “A popular movie from the 1990s illustrates the point: a briefcase, once filled with money, is not the same as a briefcase later filled with IOUs.”
That, of course, is a nod to Dumb and Dumber, in which [spoiler?] Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’ Lloyd Christmas and Harold Dunne return a briefcase that was once filled with cash — which is now packed with IOUs from them, promising to return the money they’d already spent on things like loud tuxes.
“That’s as good as money, sir,” Lloyd helpfully explains.
In short, if you’ve been accused of fraud on a massive scale, it’s best if your legal team choses a defense that isn’t reminiscent of a movie where a guy has an epic gastrointestinal meltdown.
(Via NBC News)