12th December 2022

Just over one month after the crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy, Ryan Pinder, the Attorney General of the Bahamas, announced the arrest of its founder and former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF).

According to a notice, the arrest came after the US government informed the Bahamas of criminal charges filed against Bankman-Fried and said it’s likely to request his extradition. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, confirmed his arrest, saying in a statement that “We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”

The FTX collapse revealed SBF and his associates appear to have used customer deposits with FTX to prop up his other business, the trading firm Alameda Research, before a run on FTX revealed it lacked the funds to pay back customers, and the exchange quickly shut down operations.

Bankman-Fried was scheduled to testify in congressional hearings this week, and in recent weeks has been on a seemingly non-stop media tour of interviews trying to explain what happened inside a business that, for a time, made him one of the world’s youngest billionaires.