U.S. indicts Sam Bankman-Fried with 8 charges including wire fraud and money laundering

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Keenan joins the Live show to break down all charges filed against Sam Bankman-Fried, including conspiracy to commit commodities fraud and conspiracy against the United States.

Video transcript

- Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have unsealed the indictment for founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Yahoo Finance's Alexis Keenan joins us now. She's been going through it. Obviously, it takes a little time to digest what we have in there. But we know that there are now eight counts within this indictment.

ALEXIS KEENAN: Yes, and here they are. This is a very broad-brush complaint, by the way, or indictment, I should say, coming from a grand jury. This is coming from the Southern District of New York. So these are Manhattan prosecutors making these claims.

These are the charges. They say that Sam Bankman-Fried committed conspiracy for wire fraud, also wire fraud against customers, conspiracy to commit wire fraud against lenders, wire fraud against lenders, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, as well as conspiracy for money laundering, and one that was less expected here, conspiracy against the United States and violation of campaign finance laws. We know that Bankman-Fried had been using funds from his entities to make campaign contributions.

Now, from what I've read so far-- and I'm not through the whole complaint-- it looks like the main contention here is that the funds that were given, customer funds that were pushed over to Alameda, that those were the ones that were allegedly misused and defrauding investors who put their money in FTX. So these are very, very serious charges. And these are the charges that the Justice Department will be reportedly seeking possibly extradition. The last we heard from the Justice Department was they were likely seeking extradition. We would also be expecting some sort of an arraignment to happen, where Bankman-Fried would have to come before a judge and be apprised of the charges against him before he's continued to be in custody.

- And sort of in concert with the SEC filing and civil suit that we got earlier, which alleged that basically from inception of FTX and Alameda, it was using customer funds from FTX to fund the activities at Alameda. Presumably there are similar things in the complaint. One difference between the two, the SEC complaint is mainly focused on the entities that invested in FTX as a company, whereas the criminal charges also encompass fraud on customers of FTX.

ALEXIS KEENAN: Right. So customers, lenders being brought in here as well.

- It's broader.

ALEXIS KEENAN: It's broader. And, like you say, these charges, at least for the DOJ, they're saying in or about 2019, whereas the SEC was a little more specific, saying May 2019, but basically since the inception of these companies, going all the way through to November '22, when the bankruptcy was filed. So very comprehensive. This is a lot of years.

And as far as money amounts, I'm not seeing actual dollar amounts, which plays largely into a defendant defending their case and largely into if they are convicted of any of these charges, those have a lot to do with the sentence ultimately. So we'll be looking for more information. I'm just not seeing that here in these pages. This is a very, as you say, you can see it's not very many pages here for such significant charges.

- All right, Yahoo Finance's own Alexis Keenan helping us break this down from the legal angle. And, of course, this just unsealed this morning, too. So we'll continue to really dig through some of the details here. Thanks so much, Alexis.