Patrick Boyle lays out the evidence that SBF's parents were intimately involved in the scam and likely attempted to hide assets. If true, they should be tried as well: https://youtu.be/gLvOT2AldwM?si=QCQv4j1VUrDX_cyf
> This action seeks to recover millions of dollars in fraudulently transferred and
misappropriated funds from the parents of FTX Founder Samuel Bankman-Fried (“Bankman-
Fried”): his father, Defendant Allan Joseph Bankman (“Bankman”), and his mother, Defendant
Barbara Fried (“Fried”). As Bankman-Fried’s parents, Bankman and Fried exploited their access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves, directly and indirectly, by millions of dollars, and knowingly at the expense of the debtors in these Chapter 11 Cases (the “Debtors” or the “FTX Group”) and their creditors.
His brother briefly worked at Jane Street. Right out of college he made $300k, next year $600k - his bosses liked his perf and said he'd be on track to make $5-7M per year if he stayed on for another 2-4 years.
Supposedly he still felt inadequate and hated his life...
I’m now considered probably in the top percentile of earners for my country. But I do remember struggling to make ends meet on my 16k a year first tech job out of university. I find it hard sometimes to relate to tech workers in these forums sometimes. And yes I’m in the west.
I mean, if I had a close relative with total control over a 40+ billion dollar company and a personal net worth north of 25 billion, I would want a very high salary for showing up too. I don't think asking for more was unreasonable.
Because it costs them nothing and has a major impact on my life. Why shouldn't I get paid a million a year for doing nothing? It's not like FTX was going to spend that money in a wiser fashion or even literally notice it was gone.
I'm not saying I would get upset if I didn't get it. But I would certainly ask for it.
I disagree. There a people who are nice and there are people who get capital and talent together to build new technology that makes per person productivity increase tremendously.
With Elon, he brought to cost of sending payloads into space down by a factor of more than 10.
With electric cars, he made them economically viable that many others had failed to do before. Tesla is an incredibly human efficient company compared to its competitors Ford and GM.
Same with Gates, Bezos and Steve Jobs, they got people and capital organize to boost the productivity per person working for them and people using their output (software and devices)
Good technology amplifies per person productivity.
We may hate the personality and character, but what’s worth looking at is what would be the world be like if there was no Tesla, Amazon, SpaceX or Microsoft?
>Did the likes of musk or bezos add billions of dollars in value to the economy though their own hard work?
If building Amazon, Tesla or spaceX is that easy, where is your company that changed the entire industry? What did you accomplish so far? You may not like the way they comment on social media, but they have tangible results to back up their reputation. Unlike other types of "celebrities", they actually built tangible things that most people would consider good even if they hate the face of the owner (eg. reusable rockets, electric cars, Amazon delivery, AWS, etc.).
I've designed a bunch of medical devices that have done real good in the world. I'm working to design more as we speak. Are rockets and luxury cars more important than medical care?
They did build some companies and they deserve the rewards for doing so. What they didn't do is add so much value to humanity's productivity to justify rewards in the $10^11 range.
If the dad helped architect the fraud, then it was reasonable to ask for a greater share than 0.00005% of the stolen money. The issue was the fraud, not his email asking for more money.
I lost money in FTX. I don't mind the CEO getting a 1m salary for running a multi billion dollar exchange - that's actually probably below the norm for that job. It's the stealing billions in customer funds I object to.
Don’t be daft, he’s assuming the father thinks the business is legitimate. No salary would be worth it if you know it was an illegal business as you creditors will come knocking.
Wherever you have hyper ambitious people, there will be a decent amount of them that are amoral. I'd argue most people (average or not) given a chance to do a nebulous wrong thing will do it.
Fun story, I was in a Telegram room with SBF once when my team at another company was listing FTX data on our platform. This was 2021. I asked where their headquarters was (a standard piece of data we listed for each venue) and none of their team knew what to say. Eventually he chimed in with “let’s just go with Antigua”
I remember thinking wow how strange, I wonder if these guys are doing sketchy shit. Little did I know.
From what I heard they weren't all that good at hiding the sketchiness when you got anywhere close. Even the outside investors saw the unprofessionalism and decided that yes playing LoL in the middle of meeting is actually a positive and bad accounting was not a disqualifier.
Thinking about it it's crazy to me that the simple fact of avoiding being headquartered in the US to evade financial regulations is not enough to be treated as a highly suspect enterprise and being restricted from advertising to US consumers on TV.
To be honest I think I misremembered about the accounting. It was very bad but I can't remember if any external investor noticing, it was just weird that none of them asked for a seat on the board and also failed to conduct enough due diligence to notice how bad it was.
In a way, it's like Theranos, it wouldn't be that hard to conduct just enough due diligence to notice something amiss, like the machine barely worked...
Can someone knowledgable chime in with the realistic possible penalty for SBF? The news is saying "over 100 years" which I assume has only a tenuous relationship with reality.
You can plug facts of the case into a sentencing calculator like https://www.sentencing.us/ to estimate sentencing guidelines. Sentencing guidelines generally work by look at each offense, compute an "offense level" based on facts of that offense, take the maximum of all offenses [1], and then combine that with a criminal history to yield a range.
I don't know enough of the details to plug it in to get an accurate estimate, but I'm pretty sure he managed to hit the maximum fraud offense level, at which point I'm getting an offense level of 40, which for a first time offender, is 24-30 years. Which is high enough that other factors (such as maximum sentences for crimes) are going to come into play, but it does strongly suggest that realistic prison time is going to be involve decades.
[1] This isn't entirely accurate, but maximum is a more accurate estimate than adding them all up. You actually group offenses by relatedness, and max within groups and sum the various groups, but for most practical purposes, there's only one group of offenses.
Martin Shkreli (also went through the New York district court) put together a pretty informative video on it.
It's pretty cut and dry - he's looking at about 45 points on the sentencing table. Not too long ago these were mandatory guidelines and as a result he'd be looking at life in prison.
Now a days these are recommendations and since he got pretty lucky with the judge they'll likely discount it 50ish %. So realistically he's looking at 20 years and with good behaviour he'll be out in 10.
The 85% number gets repeated around here a lot, but isn’t the full story for fed time. (Not that I’d expect software engineers to be experts on prison nuances)
Just off the top of my head RDAP will get him 1 year off (he for sure qualifies) and then a halfway house is another year although not everybody loves those. I have no idea if he’d be able to pull off a 35b or not. But you get the idea, it’s not JUST time off for good behavior.
Every competent lawyer I've seen interviewed in newspapers hedges with something like "it's hard to predict / lots of potential factors". One thing's clear, is that the scale of SBF's crimes max out the offense level of the federal sentencing guidelines. So there's no upper limit to the sentence: it's rather a question of how many mitigating factors can be found to push things downwards.
I assume that is just the journalist summing up all of the possible maximum sentences as they usually do.
It's really hard to say. On one hand he's a privileged white guy. On the other he stole from a lot of rich people. Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years, but in reality anything over 20 was a life sentence for him. I'm kind of expecting the court to throw the book at SBF simply because he was so brazen about it. When you get that far out of line people want to make an example out of you.
"Conrad Black. The first rich person to go to prison in 300 years."
But yes. If you're a rich guy, best to avoid stealing from other rich people; it does seem to be one of the few things that results in them going to prison.
(After looking at the prediction), 15 years feels very reasonable. Like, it's taking away the rest of the prime of his life, which is terrible, but there's still light at the end of the tunnel.
> SBF isn't Madoff. He didn't leave a streak of bereft retirees in his wake
FWIW, and I don't know whether to be cynical or impressed by this, but claims ($19.5BB) against Madoff's fraud have been largely restituted ($14.6BB, ~75%).
There were individual human investors in both Madoff and FTX. There were also wealth funds and the absurdly rich in both.
But as it stands today, FTX may have done more harm to humans than Madoff.
Both prosecutors and journalists tend to sum up the maximum sentence for each charge as though these are served serially, when in reality they're usually served in parallel. In this case I'd put the 95% confidence bracket at 12-20 years.
Can't speak for GP, but I recall that Elizabeth Holmes had a fairly high prediction, even by people who were using the federal guidelines. More than a few people with plausible explanations said she'd be looking at life. But she got about 10 years.
Holmes was found not guilty on 2/3 of the charges (those about fraud against doctors and patients) and guilty on 1/3 of the charges (those about fraud against her investors). Totaling about $452 mm in fraud.
Over 100 years is entirely possible in this case. Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and precedent in the 2nd Circuit, the recommended total sentence will be stacked consecutively because SBF's "offense level" counsels life in prison. Here's the calculation.
A. Max sentence:
Wire fraud on customers (20 years max) + conspiracy to commit same (20) + wire fraud on Alameda lenders (20) + conspiracy for same (20) + conspiracy securities fraud on FTX investors (20) + conspiracy commodities fraud (25) + conspiracy money laundering (20).
Base offense level (7 levels) + Greater than $550,000,000 loss (30 levels) + Resulted in substantial financial hardship to 25 or more victims (6 levels) + Offense otherwise involved sophisticated means (2 levels) + Defendant derived more than $1mm in gross receipts from one or more financial institutions (2 levels, maximum, due to a cap from earlier calculation) + Violation of securities / commodities law and defendant was "associated with a broker or dealer" or officer/director of a "futures commission merchant" (4 levels)
x axis: no criminal history. y axis, we calculated 51 levels.
The Guidelines therefore counsel life in prison.
D. Calculate sentence
The maximum sentence for each count is between 20-25 years. Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines § 5G1.2(d) and Second Circuit precedent, sentences will be stacked consecutively "to produce a combined sentence equal to the total punishment." United States v. Evans, 352 F.3d 65 (2d Cir. 2003). In our scenario, that would be 145 years. This is the same legal reasoning used in stacking Bernie Madoff's sentences in the same federal district court, by the way.
E. Judge chooses sentence. He can depart downward from the Guidelines
Appeals courts are deferential to trial court choices in sentencing, so Judge Kaplan will have substantial latitude in choosing a sentence. That said, a judge may not be too favorably disposed to a defendant who stole billions of dollars from over 1 million customers, most of whom were ordinary people; who used Tom Brady, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Shaq, and Larry David as unwitting pawns; who advertised his scam in the Super Bowl and splashed its name on an arena; who used customer money to buy lavish real estate in the Bahamas, purchase favor from politicians, and make reckless leveraged bets
Given that half of the chart is taken up by >75-year sentences, with some of them in the 200s and 300s, before hitting life, federal prosecutors seem to be a lot more confident in the miracles possible in the federal prison medical system than I am.
There is no realistic estimate at this point because we don't know how strong the prosecutor's case is. The prosecutors might even mishandle evidence and botch the case. Insider testimony might not hold up to cross examination. SBF might succeed in arguing that he acted in good faith throughout. There's no predicting how this will play out.
High profile trials (Musk, Trump, OJ Simpson, Madoff) are high variance in outcome.
Adam Neumann of WeWork committed fraud the smart way. He told qualified investors exactly how he was going to cheat them, and then got them to sign binding contracts agreeing to be cheated. That was kind of slimy and cynical behavior, but it wasn't a criminal offense under US federal fraud statutes.
I’ve really come to doubt human ability to exercise free will in all but the rarest of cases. I wonder if SBF really had a moment where a stop/go decision was meaningfully available to him. If we’re all automatons, what’s the point of prison?
I’ve been reading Michael Lewis’ account of SBF: he genuinely sounds unhinged.
Wouldn't being "automatons" be a good argument for prisons? If people's behavior is automatic then removing them from the rest of us seems like the only solution. If you believe in redemption, rehabilitation and change then a complicated system like we have seems inevitable.
Sorry I've been binging "Inside the Worlds Toughest Prisons"
If we’re all automatons, there’s no _point_ in prison, but it also doesn’t matter.
It’s just something we (automatically) place certain people in so they don’t (automatically) perform actions that society as a whole (automatically) disagrees with.
But there’s no point arguing it because in your hypothetical free will-less world we don’t have a choice in the matter. But also we might argue it anyway because we don’t have a choice not to :)
The lack of free will should mean punishment is more appropriate, because then a person's actions are a product of their nature and nurture. And punishment tips the scales of nurture toward "don't do that again."
We're even less kind to malfunctioning machinery than bad humans, so I don't think being treated as an automaton sounds like a desirable outcome for a criminal.
It really doesn't matter if free will exists (however you want to define it). Harming others for personal gain must be punished, otherwise society breaks down.
I'm generally against punishment as a whole, as I don't think it works generally, but considering how little responsibility SBF has taken for stealing all this money I think there's a reasonable chance that he'll just turn around and do the same scam again if he's not thrown in jail, or at the very least having the SEC monitoring every single thing he does.
Granted, I'm a victim of the Gemini Earn unregistered security scam [1], and so maybe I cannot be an impartial judge here, but SBF is kind of the only non-violent offender that I can think of right now that I honestly feel should be locked up and throw away the key.
[1] Before you give me a lecture about how I should have known better and how you'd never fall for such a scam and how Gemini's claims of FDIC insurance would never fool anyone smart, just rest assured I've heard it from the denizens of HN and my peers. I know I was stupid to have done anything with cryptocurrency, and even more stupid to think that Gemini wasn't misleading people about their Gemini Earn program. Just to be clear though, it's not my accusation to called Gemini Earn an unregistered security, it's the SEC's (https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-7).
"we shouldn't lock people up for non-violent crimes except for ones similar to the one I was a victim of" seems like kind of a..limited view?
I don't think there's anything particular about SBF that makes him more likely to re-offend (And even if he wanted to, one would hope he'd have a hard time convincing folks to hand over another 8 billion for him to embezzle a second time).
Which isn't to say that I don't think he should go to jail (he definitely should!), just that I don't think he's any more jail worthy then people who engage in other forms of non-violent theft and/or fraud.
Well, I mean, that's why I admitted my bias. I do think I'd have the same position even if I weren't a victim of a crypto scam, but I felt it important to disclose potential conflicts in what I'm saying.
SBF went on many podcasts and interviews, and instead of showing even the slightest hint of remorse, he instead denied everything, blamed everyone but himself, then pleaded ignorance, all while also claiming that he probably won't be charged with any crimes. I recommend looking at CoffeeZilla's coverage on this.
We can find plenty of examples of convicted conmen that manage to get funding again. Off the top of my head, the wolf of Wall Street himself, Jordan Belfort, was convicted of securities fraud, spent almost two years in jail, was banned from any kind of stock trading, but now promotes all kind of cryptocurrency and multilevel marketing scams.
“I don't think there's anything particular about SBF that makes him more likely to re-offend”
No? Not the alleged (and very convincing) parent involvement? The total lack of remorse and continued denial? The latter is typical for fraudsters, but the former is pretty particular to SBF, and definitely would incline someone to be a repeat offender imo.
I think I would more easily be convinced that Madoff deserved rehabilitation than SBF.
There are certain behaviors in fraudsters that make me think they are psychopathic fraudsters and really incapable of dealing with the world without deceit. That naturally overlaps other dark triad traits that make it hard but not impossible for someone to put aside deceit and allow some deflation of their ego, etc.
I'm not a fan of Donald Trump at all, but he's never actually been convicted of fraud has he?
I'm not disputing that he's committed fraud, but I think that a lot of his followers can do a lot of mental gymnastics and convince themselves that he never actually did anything illegal, in no small part because he's never directly been convicted.
Isn't he banned from operating a nonprofit in New York now, and didn't Trump University get a civil judgement (I'm aware you might not call that a fraud conviction) that disbanded it? That's just from memory - if not technically a criminal, he's quite certifiably crooked, but people will still throw money at him, and I'll never understand people.
The other figure that comes to mind is Adam Nuemann (and I'm not alleging anything criminal against him), but apparently he just has a personality that draws VCs with dumptrucks full of money like moths to a flame.
Clearly people just have tons of money they don't need these days.
In regards to Trump University, I think it was technically settled [1]. I think in that particular case, people argue he had plausible deniability because it was just a bad branding deal, and that he wasn't directly involved in anything crooked. I don't remember the outcome the Donald J Trump foundation embezzlement scandal from a few years ago, but I'm sure his followers would just say NYC is a crooked liberal state and it was rigged against him anyway. In fact, because it's rigged against him, that's why he needs donations!
Just to be clear, I think he's a moron and a fraudster; even if you could prove that Trump University and the Donald J Trump Foundation and the hoarding of classified documents and the collusion with Russia was all hogwash, the fact that he didn't divest himself from his businesses after assuming power should be a bright red flag to people.
He used blatantly demagogical language throughout his entire campaign and presidency, and basically claimed that "he alone" knows how to fix every problem.
I tend to be pretty far-left (at least by American standards), but some of the "Bernie Or Bust" rhetoric has gone a bit crazy sometimes; I don't think Bernie Sanders is nearly as horrible as someone like Donald Trump (I voted for him in the primary in 2016), and I certainly don't think he's an outright fraudster, but I do feel like he (and his followers) kind of cozy up to demagogue-adjacent language as well.
I think people really really like the idea that one magical person can and will solve all their problems.
But that's about as far as I'll go towards partisan politics since I don't want to get hellbanned.
I suspect we're ideologically fairly close though I did not vote for Sanders in the primary, I believe I actually skipped 2016 then voted for Warren 2020, but I'd have been fine with Sanders though I agree he did have a fanatical contingent that was a bit off-putting. I don't think he actively encouraged that either.
I've long worked with and even dabbled a bit in sales (which would have shocked a young hotpotamus to learn - it's basically the opposite of my natural inclinations). I was quite bad at it myself - I would often try to explain nuances to people and how they need to invest in their own skill as well as buying a good product. Salespeople who promised them simple solutions that would solve all their problems were far more successful, which was a bitter early lesson for me.
What rankles though is that Trump is so transparently a buffoon - I can't believe it works for him.
> I would often try to explain nuances to people and how they need to invest in their own skill as well as buying a good product.
Yeah, this is (partly) why I was not a good professor/teacher. I don't think I was horrible at it, but I have a very strong compulsion to mention every bit of nuance in what I'm talking about. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but when a student is trying to learn introductory programming, getting into the weeds about how the textbook is "basically right but kind of simplistic because in this case..." really is not the right approach for teaching freshman students. I grew a new respect for teachers who learned to suppress those instincts and teach the simplified stuff.
I almost think that Trump being an idiot works to his advantage. He's so utterly stupid that I think he's completely unburdened by any kind of nuance, and as a result it's very easy for him to speak authoritatively about everything, no matter how wrong he is.
Consider adding corruption and large-scale fraud to your list.
Punishment has three purposes: deterrence, incapacitation and retribution. The first two are simple. The last seems irrational. Yet if you ignore it, you wind up with people executing a parallel system of justice (i.e. taking matters into their own hands) and generally losing trust in society.
Within the category of crimes that maximise the need for that last element, it’s wide-scale actions that harm a lot of people, visibly, done by a member of or someone perceived to be proximate to the elite.
aside: I see "retribution" on these lists a lot and usually these days it's disgarded. IMO it's discarded prematurely.
The sort of retribution that is like "X hurt me, so punish them" is the one everybody seems to no longer believe in, and that's fine. But there is another sense of retribution that I think is very valuable, which is "maintaining the status quo that people who commit crimes are punished for them". It's not personal retribution but more of a "belief that the system will handle retribution", and it is important because it helps us believe that there is a legitimate criminal justice system that takes care of justice for us and which we can delegate justice to.
You alluded to this in your comment when you said "losing trust in society". Mostly I just want to observe that to me it feels like it deserves a separate bullet-point instead of being lumped in with "retribution".
I would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules. Punishment causes damage to society beyond just the individual being punished. Criminals have jobs, families and relationships with people who haven't broken the law. Punishment should be used sparingly as the cost to all of society is high. I also believe we'd have lower crime if the massive budgets currently being used on police would be instead used to improve the health and welfare of high crime communities.
> would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules
I thought similarly. But these are baked into our psyches. Jailing the drunk driver won’t bring back the dead child, but if you don’t do it there will be backlash. This sense is profound enough that we generally celebrate people who take justice into their own hands when they’re denied retribution through lawful channels.
If I were to cite one common failure mode of the last decades’ criminal justice reform efforts (in America, but coast to coast) it’s in attempting to rationalise away our social need for retribution. The key is in recognising that every exercise of justice need not satisfy all three facets. A remorseful defendant need not be incapacitated. And a crime with no human victim need not seek retribution.
> I would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules. Punishment causes damage to society beyond just the individual being punished.
In your belief it seems you discount the cost of "finding the root causes of crimes and taking actions to fix them" with the idea seeming to be that a greater good is achieved that way than through punishment. However, you fail to realize that there are very real costs to society for enabling this root cause analysis, to the detriment of our civil liberties. Every time you take off your shoes at the airport, you are being punished for someone else's crimes.
> I would rather have a belief that the system will find the root causes of crime and take actions to fix them then believe the system will punish those who break the rules.
IANAL but I'm curious if intent is the deciding factor. Maddoff got 150 years because he knowingly operated a criminal enterprise and admitted to the whole thing eventually. His sons even testified against him when they found out. Maddoff went to great extents to construct his criminal enterprise, operating a small boiler room out of the front office.
If prosecutors can show that actual malice and intent were part of his motive then logic would follow he'd get a Maddoff-like sentence. If he's just the worlds biggest bumbling idiot that people put too much faith and money in then it'd be lesser. I'm not quite caught up to when SBF knew he'd started a criminal enterprise versus when he was making reckless decisions.
Punishment, deterrence for others, and deterrence for the individual themselves, are three important parts of why the state has consequences for bad deeds.
The US is pretty punishment-heavy. As a non-US person it even looks sadistic. It's "now I got you, you son of a bitch" social game from "Games People Play".
Since you're against "punishment as a whole", I assume you by "punishment" mean "I want them to suffer for what they did"?
Giving more than (say) 20 years to most 20-year-old murderer is no different from 120, from either deterrence perspective. When they're 40 they'll be a different person. 120 years of terrible prison conditions does not make anyone better off, compared to 20. Except for the victim's "sense of justice". But man, 20 years? No year more than that will bring your loved one back.
Anyway, I agree that we need both types of deterrence for SBF. Otherwise what's to stop people counting on getting "only" 10 years. Steal a billion dollars, hide it in cryptocurrencies, and when you get out of prison you're older, sure, but you are super rich.
We need deterrence from him doing it again. And we need deterrence for everyone like him, and everyone who would be remotely involved him people like him. People need to know that if you help this kind of scam, there are dire consequences. Which is why his parents should face the full weight of the harm they caused, to show that it will all be taken away.
But I don't see that as "punishment". Not in the way I think you mean it.
I say this with sympathy as I suspect some number of violent individuals have as-yet-undetected genetic abnormalities that would make them 'blameless' for their actions if we could track it down. However that wouldn't change their behavior. My son has a non-violent known genetic abnormality and in 20/40/60 years his behavior wouldn't change unless some effective treatment is found.
So I think there needs to be some realism injected into this discussion. There are people I would not want as next door neighbors even after they've served a long prison sentence.
There's a lot of evidence that most people mellow out with age, age-crime curves show this clearly with dramatic peaks in the late teens. Teenagers and young adults are more prone to acting impulsively, with less foresight for the future.
There may be some people who are irreparably 'genetically damaged' from birth and will never improve, but this isn't the general case.
I feel like most of us kind of intuitively know this at a somewhat visceral level. If a two year old does something obnoxious (e.g. throws food at you), I think most people won't be nearly as upset as if a 40 year old did. I know when my nieces or nephews do something annoying, it's substantially easier for me to roll my eyes and say something like "they're just kids, don't get angry with them" than it is when a full-on grownup annoys me.
I'm quite confident that 18 year old me was still basically a child. I never committed any violent crimes when I was 18, but I did a lot of other dumb irrational things that I don't think I'd do now.
In addition to the other reply you got from someone else:
I'm not saying they'll necessarily be great people. But people do change. Especially the understanding of consequences is not fully developed in your early 20s.
So even if they are basically the same people, they would be much less likely to act on it at 40 than at 20. And really, we're talking about deterrence of committing crimes, not deterrence of bad moral character.
> Since you're against "punishment as a whole", I assume you by "punishment" mean "I want them to suffer for what they did"?
Yeah, I clarified in a sibling comment, but that's basically what it comes down to.
I generally just don't think punishing people with the express purpose of making them suffer is a good thing. I think it's cruel, and I also don't think it actually works in regards to helping society long-term. The fact that it's sort of common knowledge that you'll be sexually assaulted in prison, and people seem bizarrely fine with that because "they deserve it" really disturbs me, for example.
In regards to SBF specifically, I'm not convinced he won't try and run a similar scam again; if not in the US, then in another country with less strict securities laws. He doesn't appear to have any remorse about what he's done, and blamed everyone but himself for everything.
I agree that we have no need for vengance against the criminal.
But the fact that SBF would do it again is not a case for vengance/punishment, but for deterrence. And, frankly, it's harder to launch your next scam while you're currently incarcerated.
I hear you saying "I don't want vengance, but…", but there's actually no contradiction there. You want deterrence and to prevent recidivism.
And merely taking all his money, and all his parents money, is not actually a deterrence. But that doesn't mean prison is vengence/punishment for punishment's sake.
> it's sort of common knowledge that you'll be sexually assaulted in prison
While a blasé attitude toward such abuse is certainly reprehensible, I don't think there's any support for the magnitude you describe.
Even the most dramatic statistics imply that prisoners are far more likely to not be assaulted.
Official numbers are like 2-5%, activist numbers are in the 20% range.
Anything greater than 0% is horrifying of course. Although FWIW I also checked official and activist numbers for non-incarcerated males and females in the US, and it's actually very similar.
(Never been in prison, never been a victim, never been a perpetrator, not in law enforcement, not an activist, don't know what I'm talking about, but wish the problem could be understood honestly and eliminated completely.)
I suppose that's what I get for relying on common knowledge.
If that 20% number is right, that's completely terrifying. A 1 in 5 shot being sexually assaulted is still very high, and when I have argued with people about prison reform, they seem wholly uninterested in fixing the problem.
> Giving more than (say) 20 years to most 20-year-old murderer is no different from 120, from either deterrence perspective. When they're 40 they'll be a different person
There was an interesting interview with Matt Cox (stole $55 million or so via mortgage fraud) where someone asked him what amount of prison time would have deterred him from re-offending (he got like 30 years originally).
He said anything above 5 actual years in prison (so like 8 sentenced years) and he was never breaking the law in a major way again. That losing such a length of time was not worth any amount of money to him, essentially.
In what sense doesn't it work though? Because from a re-offending rate it unequivocally does work.
In terms of preventing new crimes from being committed, I think the honest answer is "it depends". I think early intervention and preventing crime in the first place is always going to beat punishing people for crimes after the fact.
What? Citation is definitely needed for that claim about Scandinavia.
Restorative justice may not "work" for every single person in every single situation but neither does punitive sentencing. If you look at recidivism for whether it "works" then restorative justice performs way better in the majority of cases. Then we should consider the moral/ethical correctness of what the justice system is and what it should do.
I don't think this type of dichotomy of thinking is helpful. Given that the research seems to suggest that "heavy punitive sentencing" doesn't reduce crime, I think the take away is that human behavior is difficult to change.
I do not think punishment is a good deterrent, no; I think the data more or less says that as well. If you look at Scandinavia, where they generally have a much higher emphasis on reform instead of "punishment for punishment's sake", and they also have a substantially lower recidivism rate compared to the US.
Now obviously, I'll fully acknowledge that it's not completely apples to apples; there almost certainly a million differences between the US and Scandinavia that contribute to differences in crime statistics, but I think it does demonstrate that reducing emphasis on punishment doesn't turn the world into this post apocalyptic dystopia.
> they also have a substantially lower recidivism rate compared to the US.
How sure are you of that? It's easy to get lost in the weeds, but looking at similar timelines and similar definitions of what constitutes recidivism, the US compares favorably to Sweden [0].
Worth noting is that the data is very noisy. You'd expect that recidivism would be monotonically increasing with years post-conviction, but it varies quite a bit year by year so this is not what the statistics show. This noise also makes it pretty easy to cherry pick numbers to suit your argument.
> More than 60 people died in shootings last year in Sweden, the highest figure on record.
This may be a lot of people for Sweden (~0.5 death per ~100K people); it's not a lot of people in the general sense. Per [1], 19,000 people died from gun homicides in the US in the same year (5 per 100K people). Not exactly a sign that Sweden's system is failing relative to the US.
I can assure you that every single Swede agrees that it's failing. People are horrified at what's happening.
Anyway, bringing up Scandinavia as one unit doesn't work anymore when there's such a big difference between Sweden and for example Norway where restorative justice is still successful.
I'm generally against punishment for punishment's sake; obviously if a serial killer is running loose, they should be locked up as a matter of making sure they don't kill more people, and maybe that even applies to non-violent crimes as well.
What I don't like is the American take [1] of locking people up for years and years and then ruining their remaining lives with a felony conviction making them forever unemployable, all to stroke some kind of cosmic idea that we are "even" for whatever they did.
If you look at other countries that have a much higher emphasis on reformation, and less of an emphasis on "punishment", they have a measurably lower recidivism rate.
That's basically what I'm getting at; I don't really believe in "punishment" as some cosmic good, I believe in maximizing safety and reformation.
Here in New Zealand the current government came into power 6 years ago with a policy of reducing the prison population by 30 per cent. Not by increasing focus on prevention of crime, but by locking up fewer people. They achieved this target, and as a result crime - especially violent crime - has skyrocketed.
I think you live in a sheltered little bubble. In fact we know from your first post in this thread that when you're personally impacted by crime you quickly change your tune, much like hundreds of thousands of former NZ Labour voters.
> In fact we know from your first post in this thread that when you're personally impacted by crime you quickly change your tune,
That's actually not what I said. I was disclosing a potential bias but I never said that I "changed my tune".
I was mugged about two month ago and had my expensive iPhone stolen out of my hands. I filed a police report and reported the phone stolen to Apple, but I very explicitly said that I didn't want to press any kind of criminal charges on the off chance that the phone is recovered and the thief was caught.
> People still steal iPhones?? I thought the non-reusability of parts had eliminated that problem.
This guy did! Snatched it right out of my hand. I of course did the iPhone lock on "Find My", and since I reported the IMEI number to the police I don't think they'll be able to easily activate it, so I suspect that the phone is probably on the bottom of the Hudson now.
He did lightly shove me, but I wasn't really "injured" at all; not a scratch on me outside of my ego.
Also with felony conviction and with the records being there for however long they are it makes it nigh impossible to get a job once your prison sentence is over.
Once you're out you still need to survive. And if the only way of survival is more crime that's what you choose.
It's hard to say how effective it is but an aspect of that sort of punishment is general deterrence which became more common versus reformation approaches in the 80s and 90s, where the intent is to increase the perceived risk of the crime. I think generally more approach on reformative punishment in the US would be good, but there also still examples where deterrence is useful.
One more recent example is DUI enforcement and license revocation,[1] or tax evasion jail time. The goal isn't entirely to reform those who commit the crime, or keep them from being able to commit further crimes, but to increase the percentage of people not committing crimes by changing the perceived risk to reward ratio.
> If you look at other countries that have a much higher emphasis on reformation, and less of an emphasis on "punishment", they have a measurably lower recidivism rate.
I have trouble finding good evidence for this. Easy enough to find cherry picked numbers when someone is trying to make a point, but what I see is that the data on recidivism is pretty noisy and subject to a number of parameters that can make it hard to compare across jurisdictions.
You call it 'cosmic good', but there's nothing cosmic about it, the victims are often right there in court, and it isn't exactly justice if all they get for the suffering that was inflicted on them is to get to see their offender get some therapy and let out to live his life.
Eg, a rape victim is likely going to have at least mental scars for much of the rest of their life, there's nothing cosmic about the rapist having to suffer for at least a comparable length of time for inflicting that on the victim.
I don't believe that two wrongs make a right. I also don't believe the world is a video game where "suffering points" are counted. I of course feel bad for any victim of a violent crime like murder or rape, but I don't really see how it benefits the world to have the rapist "suffer at least for a comparable length of time as the victim".
A rapist should obviously be put in jail to prevent them from raping other people, so I'm not saying that they should be free from consequences, but no, I don't think the world is better place because we have a bureaucratic reenactment of "I Spit on Your Grave".
Maybe in some isolated case a violent offender will feel the punishment and pain they're getting and then empathize and feel like they brought it on themself, but I think in a vast majority of cases, the offender has already rationalized what they're doing and just gets increasingly mad at the system.
How exactly would you even measure a "comparable length of time of suffering"?
If it is true that retribution does not have deterrence value, and anything we do along that line will just make the criminal more sullen and likely to reoffend in the future, why not just toss the key and be done with it? Life sentences for everyone. Recidivism rate 0%.
I’m sure you realize how abnormal your opinion is. Most people and societies disagree with you. You shouldn’t speak as of your ideas are inherently correct.
I'm not sure why you are saying this. I never claimed my ideas are inherently correct, I didn't try and provide a syllogism or proof or anything, I just said what I believe.
I agree they're not terribly common. That's fine if people disagree.
The threat of punishment doesn't stop people from committing violent crime. Even if you totally eliminated the threat of prison, the actual threat of committing violent crime is that someone will retaliate/defend themselves against you. If you're willing to put your life on the line to rob someone, whether or not you might get put in jail isn't even going to register.
Non-violent and financial crime is a different story. SBF should go to prison for life and maybe that would dissuade others from trying to pull of scams of this scale. Every politician who accepted money from SBF should also go to prison if they don't return 100% of the money given to them.
The threat of punishment is broadly ineffective at preventing violent crimes that arise from inflamed tempers or insanity, mental spaces in which people do not respond rationally to incentives and punishments.
However, incarceration incapacitates convicts and prevents them from being able to re-victimize the public for the duration of their incarceration. Locking up serial killers is a good idea, not because it dissuades other would-be serial killers (it probably doesn't) but rather because a serial killer who's locked up in a cell is a serial killer everybody else doesn't have to worry about.
(Furthermore, the threat of punishment probably does dissuade the kind of murders that might be committed in 'cold blood' by rational people. For instance, it may be easier for a robber to shoot everybody in the jewelry store than to waste time with crowd control, but doing the robbery nonviolently is incentivized by the severe penalties for mass murder.)
I agree that this is a more legitimate reason to put people in prison, but I think it needs to be very selective to be effective. Serial killers need to be taken out of circulation but drug offenders do not imo. Often you turn people into an even deeper life of crime after removing them from society, putting them in psychologically damaging situations and exposing them to intensified organized crime that exists in prison. Not to mention any collateral damage such as the offender's family who may now also suffer and be drawn more towards conditions that would breed crime.
With nonviolent crimes, such as drug abuse and financial crimes, I think the utility of incarceration depends on the degree to which the criminal might still be hurting society in nonviolent ways which would be prevented by incarceration. Maybe drug abuse is itself a victimless crime (I think there's room to disagree fwiw), in which case incapacitation via incarceration wouldn't be useful.
But I think you can't make that claim about financial criminals like Bankman-Fried or Bernie Madoff; these were not victimless crimes. They victimized many people, therefore putting them in prison for the rest of their lives is a fairly straight forward way of making sure they'll never get the opportunity to do it again.
> Not to mention any collateral damage such as the offender's family who may now also suffer and be drawn more towards conditions that would breed crime.
Particularly in the case of these two men, the damage to the offenders family is completely irrelevant; their families are wealthy and are probably beneficiaries of the crimes anyway, so screw their feelings. And it's not like Bankman-Fried has a young son that will grow up to be a criminal because his daddy is in prison. Elizabeth Holmes has some kids but I'm confident they'll be fine with their mother in prison; their father's family has plenty of resources to raise them properly. And what of the children of the victims of white collar crime, who will grow up poorer because their parents were scammed? This 'family impact' angle of objection to imprisonment for white collar crimes isn't very persuasive.
I'm also starting to think that people underplay the devastation financial crimes cause relative to physical violence. People in a very real sense "eat money".
If you steal someone's life savings you've harmed them way worse than just giving them a beating. And investment fraudsters tend to also have a lot of victims.
That's never mind the physical harm that results from the stress of losing your life savings, including substance abuse and in extreme cases suicide.
Fundamentally if you're going to have laws, and for the laws to mean anything, there has to be a consequence for violating them. There are maybe three ways to do this: financial penalties (fines), community service or some other sort of forced labor/obligations, or incarceration.
If you're not willing to do these things, you should just do away with the law in question. Otherwise you reduce the respect and confidence people have for that law, and by extension all law.
That’s an awfully certain statement. I don’t know man, it seem likely that some people will be dissuaded from pursuing non passion driven violent crime by appropriate risk of punishment.
It's not a perfect solution but it's also not believable that what's stopping people from committing violence is the law and not the violence itself. If you're willing to commit premeditated violence, you're already far beyond the influence of the law.
If someone carjacks a car they are willing to accept the risk that the person they're robbing may have a gun. They are literally willing to put their life at risk, something only someone with nothing to lose would do. Do think maybe getting caught by the police and spending 10 years in prison is as big of a threat to this person as being shot and killed (a risk they've already decided to take)?
have you considered that a person who is in a life situation where turning to crime becomes a viable option is perhaps underestimating the risk and negative impact of either situation?
Or, both are deterrents but one or both can be weaker than the other depending on the perceived risk by the person committing the crime. Having multiple deterrents should be a greater deterrent as a whole across the average of potential criminals.
> Every politician who accepted money from SBF should also go to prison if they don't return 100% of the money given to them.
Even if they surrendered all the money given to them, and lets assume they even paid interest and another fine on top of that, I'm not sure they should be allowed to be politicians anymore.
Politicians are very specifically a "trust" job. The fact that they even took the money signals that they were receptive to bribes, and I think should signal to the courts that they cannot be trusted to represent the will of their voters. Just because bribes and lobbying are commonplace right now doesn't mean they should be.
I sincerely believe in the death penalty in cases where more than $1 million is stolen. Let's put the fear of god into the white collar business criminals and then maybe they'll rethink things.
I'm very very broadly against the death penalty even in the worst of cases, but even entertaining what you suggest, I certainly think that a million is pretty low to be executed for.
I'm not even sure how you'd fully quantify that; suppose I had a flash drive with a crypto wallet worth two million bucks in my backpack, and then when I get up to go to the bathroom someone steals my backpack.
Now, technically this person stole "more than a million dollars", but I don't think you'd suggest we dust off the gallows just for snatching a backpack would you?
I had hoped that it would be clear from context that I'm talking about someone who commits financial fraud, not just someone stealing a backpack, but if that was not clear then that is on me.
Disagree on $1 million being a low threshold. There are fraud operations out there that steal $10k from one pensioner and $50K from another that in aggregate hit $1 million. I think everyone involved in the fraud end of something like that deserves to forfeit their lives.
I mean, I was being deliberately obtuse on it to be fair!
While I could see myself getting onboard with locking these fraudsters up for the rest of their lives, I think our disagreement stems from the fact that I think actually executing people should be reserved for explicitly violent crimes, if at all. As stated, I'm broadly against the death penalty in any case, but I'm more amenable to it in regards as a direct means of public safety from violence.
Statutes as harsh as this have been tried but were repealed for unspecified reasons (Draco’s laws in Athens) or because juries wouldn’t convict in death penalty cases very often (England’s Bloody Code).
Yeah, I think I saw in a video or something where you used to be able to be hanged for forgery, which basically led to no one ever being convicted of forgery because people didn't feel like the punishment really fit the crime.
I had most of my networth in FTX and it all went down with it.
20 yrs of work, savings, and TSLA + NVIDIA winnings gone just like that
It didn’t make any sense what ftx was doing at the time. It’s one thing to steal and embezzle, it’s another to rob the thing wholesale from top to bottom.
Its almost like someone schemed all this out, just to funnel people’s money to politicians
I’m afraid we won’t ever get to the truth of it, kind of like the Epstein case
I'm guessing here, and the wanton corporate expenses for the benefit of corporate employees and officers were a big problem, but for the main problem I feel that from their point of view they convinced themselves they were not stealing and embezzling. They had Alameda "invest" with the consumer's money, but they could sincerely thought they were winners, and that the clients would get their money. It's not like with some other cryptocurrency scams where they grabbed the loot and ran. Like seriously, if SBF was thinking of robbing the thing wholesale why didn't he have an escape plan? Where is Ruja Ignatova?
Funnel money to politicians? SBF definitively put money into the political system (on both sides), but that total amount seems to be dwarfed by even one of his super-luxurious properties in the Bahamas.
One thing that the financial press is looking at is where the courts draw the line between incompetence and outright fraud.
Everyone agrees that FTX funneled money from FTX customers accounts to Alemada. The government is claiming this is fraud, SBF is claiming it was just allowing Alemeda to have more leverage than other clients.
Everyone agrees that FTX gave SBF's parents $30M in real estate. The government is claiming this was fraud, SBF is claiming that it was just payment for work done by his parents for FTX.
Everyone agrees that a large part of Alemeda's balance sheet were coins that only had value because they held almost all of them and only they transacted in them, thereby allowing them to keep the price high. The government claims this is accounting fraud and SBF claims this was just a bad marking of their price.
Everyone agrees that FTX bought around $100 million in Bahamian realestate. The government says this was stealing from FTX's customers, while SBF is claiming this was just to house FTX employees.
Everyone agrees that FTX paid $100's of millions to celebrity endorsers and arena naming deals. The government claims the source of these funds were customers money. SBF claims that both FTX's own cash and customers funds were just one big pool that he just didn't have enough accounting and risk management rules enforced on that large pool of resources to know that FTX ran out of money and he was using customers funds to buy things.
I'm not an expert in case law but one thing that stand out to me is just how many of SBF's "friends" and partners have fully turned on him and will testify against him. Caroline Ellison, the CEO of Alameda, Gary Wang, the CTO of FTX and Nishad Singh, FTX' engineering director have all signed cooperation agreements.
Also rumours are that SBF will testify, which short of Trump testifying , seems like the worst possible person to take the stand.
The winners in this will be the bankruptcy lawyers and people who had cash on had to buy FTX customer claims for 20-30% on the dollar. I think funds that had the forsight to buy these claims and create a side car for their investment will do very well.
The yield on this trade though will be determined mostly by the recovery rate and probably more so by the time it takes the lawyers to pay out claims as I've never met a bankruptcy lawyer who was in a hurry to part with the cash and lucrative billing rates they make.
One other thing i'm watching but not related to the trials is how far back FTX's bankruptcy lawyers go after people who withdrew money from FTX.
With Maddoff the bankruptcy lawyers went after anyone who took money out going back many years. Supposedly there were a few larger hedge funds who took money out of FTX weeks before it went under and stopped withdrawls. There is plenty of precedence for the trustees to go after those funds to ask for the withdrawls back.
FTX was not a bank, it was an exchange. People were not giving FTX money to lend out to others in exchange for interest (as they would a bank). People were buying products (cryptocurrencies) from FTX that FTX agreed to hold on their behalf. FTX doing anything with these assets other than holding them on behalf of customers is fraud.
FTX's own Terms of Service explicitly said it was not permitted to lend out customer funds.
SBF himself repeatedly stated that FTX did not lend out customer funds.
> People were not giving FTX money to lend out to others in exchange for interest
Depending on state law, if you put down a deposit for e.g. flowers, the florist is free to spend the cash however they see fit, including loaning it out to someone. Lending customer funds per se does not prove fraud. Bankman-Fried lying about it does.
Sorry, was FTX a florist? I'm confused by your remark. Can you show some evidence that FTX was selling flowers, and that they had been using customer deposits for flowers on business expenses?
It’s an analogy. Lending out—or even spending on working capital—customer deposits isn’t necessarily illegal. The context is what makes it fraud or business as usual.
And the context is that FTX is not taking deposits for flowers, they are purchasing and holding assets on their customers' behalf, so your florist analogy makes absolutely no sense.
> they are purchasing and holding assets on their customers' behalf, so your florist analogy makes absolutely no sense
No, they were accepting customers' cash in exchange for something undefined. Crypto being unregulated, we can conclusively say that something was not "purchasing and holding assets on their customers' behalf."
FTX is, in many respects, more like a florist than a financial firm. Certainly for purposes of this case. (My florist's books are better organized.)
One, it's unclear if that's criminal commingling versus breach of contract by FTX.
Two, that's what I mean--absent additional representations, the lending out of customer deposits on its own does not constitute fraud or even anything illegal. That's the point of the comparison to a florist. In terms of consumer protections, my deposit with my florist is about (albeit not precisely) on par with customers' at FTX's. This is what you get when you stick your finger to the regulated system and put your money outside it.
Which I understand as, it's gota be determined the extent of the lying to determine the extent of the fraud ; some you-didnt-read-the-contract-well-enough responsability may incumb on the customer(s).
holding assets on their customers' behalf
Who said he was, him?
Of course Im playing devil's advocate here to illustrate the logic of the law as presented by our friend here.
They're not supposed to co-mingle client money and company money. They did that with no controls and used it for all sorts of things without the permission of their clients, who thought it was invested in very specific assets. They are an exchange letting people buy crypto assets.
Not sure on the rules for banks but FTX was not a regulated bank!
The law makes a distinction between "misrepresentation of material fact" and fraud, though. Fraud means knowingly making a misrepresentation of material fact.
It depends on the specifics. If they are listed on payroll, that might be not be neither a misrepresentation or fraud. If you had good reason to believe they were hired, but weren't, I'd imagine that would land as an honest misrepresentation. If you knowingly "pretended" they were employees but they weren't, that's probably closer to fraud.
Do you know the particulars in this case? It doesn't look like the article covers that specific aspect and I'm not terribly familiar with this case.
I imagine what the judge will be looking at is whether they did any meaningful work for the company and whether house purchases were included in the contract and why.
> A company giving money to the parents of the owner is fraud.
None of those points are actually fraud on their own, except potentially one. The companies use of customers funds would likely fit the definition of fraud, this is unlawful gain.
A company can legally give out loans. Companies give out signing bonuses, salaries, gifts etc, the problem comes down to whether it fits the definition of fraud.
Even if it all just was extraordinary incompetence, it doesn't seem like it would set a good precedent for that to be a successful defense. If this works, it seems like we'd see a lot more places purposely accounting for things poorly because there's a precedent that they can get away with it by saying they didn't know any better...
Before I really knew who this person was I remember him making news by being on a podcast basically saying it's all made up and a ponzi scheme. I could be remembering it wrong but everything I've read since then seems criminal.
As soon as you add "purposely" to the mix, you clearly moved over into fraud...
I think you are ultimately correct that extraordinary incompetence would still be some crime. Question does seem legitimate that it isn't necessarily fraud?
Manslaughter is not murder, but it's still a crime. Executives are often held to the "knew or should have known" standard. So, yes, in his position, extraordinary incompetence is still a crime.
My point is that if accidental incompetence is allowed but purposeful incompetence isn't, it becomes makes it a goal to try to seem genuinely incompetent, which seems like a bad thing
I can kind of see the hazard, if I squint. But that would still be a crime, in a lot of cases. And if you look incompetent, there are serious questions to ask on why you are getting backing.
Consider, if a bus system lets a genuinely incompetent driver on the street, there are all sorts of fines they will face. Rightfully so. Same for a hospital that has a genuinely incompetent doctor.
Now, if you are incompetent at things that are not your core competency, things are different. But, in general, incompetency at the level we are looking at here should raise as many questions on why so many others ignored red flags.
The original comment I was responding to went into great detail about how the defense is claiming that all of the mishaps were due to incompetence rather than malice, so my responses were my views on that sort of defense strategy. It sounds like you don't think this sort of defense is valid at all, but I'm not sure why you're arguing with me like I was the one who presented that idea.
It is valid for some crimes, not others. I don't know if it is valid in this particular case.
But, even if it is, that wouldn't excuse purposefully being incompetent.
So, your concern about this encouraging the appearance of incompetence feels off. You could maybe actually be incompetent, such that you would have a legal defense. However, if you are, how did you get to the point of causing harm?
A sibling post earlier pointed out that manslaughter is not murder. That is basically what I'm posting. Just incompetence to fraud, as manslaughter is to murder.
Does the existence of manslaughter pose a hazard of people pretending to accidently kill others? Maybe? But evidence is lacking that it is a major hazard.
Why is it bad to testify in your own case? I have heard this from time to time but have not understood it. Is it not your chance to tell it like it is?
The burden of proof is on the prosecution. If they can't prove that you did something wrong, you are more likely to get off.
Your lawyers can poke holes in the prosecution's case ("cast doubt" on it). Make it look like a weak case.
Getting on the stand and explaining an alternate timeline actually give the prosecution MORE evidence, from the horse's mouth. They can find new things you did wrong, they can find inconsistencies in your story, inconsistencies between what you said today and what you said last week. You're likely to commit perjury.
You're not expected to convince the jury of an alternate timeline, you just need them to NOT believe the very specific one the prosecution lays out.
My understanding is that, in general, you don't want to testify period. Even just being called as a witness is a difficult thing to do, as you are entering an arena that you are almost certainly not practiced at. You will slip up and say some things wrong. And you will have a hard time keeping your composure and actually connecting with the attorneys, judge, and jury.
For a witness, this really just means more stress than you were likely expecting going into the process. For someone actually involved in the trial, I imagine it is everything multiplied.
Yep. They will ask some questions they can prove the answers to, and those will usually be the ones that implicate you. If you lie, they'll call all your other testimony into question, as well as get you at least one perjury charge! If you don't lie, you admitted to the crime you committed, and could have saved a lot of hassle by pleading guilty to begin with. If you plead the 5th, it's officially the same as if you'd never testified to begin with, but juries may still be biased to see that as you attempting to hide something you're guilty about. Better to avoid testifying at all.
It's bad for SBF to testify because he's such a weird person. If he can't present himself sympathetically the jury may interpret that as lack of remorse.
In general it's hard for the prosecution to bring up evidence of prior, unrelated convictions or wrongdoing. If you take the stand they are allowed to bring it up to impune your credibility as a witness though. Doesn't really apply to SBF, but it's an additional reason to those others have stated for anybody with a criminal past.
I think this is an interesting analysis. My speculation is that the evidence will show much more intent than expected. I think the cooperation agreements are reflective of that and suggest those folks knew what they were doing wasn't right.
Edit: I am skeptical that that significant money will be recovered. Madoff ran a rather simple scheme where he skimmed money for himself and to pay earlier investors. I don't believe he actually lost that much money, just never made anywhere near the paper returns. I think FTX actually lost a lot of real money, but I am not that close to the facts.
You see a lot of "knew or should have known" in indictments of professionals who do sketchy things. I don't think you can hide behind gross incompetence in situations like that.
>To what extent is Sbf used as a scapegoat by the media
The guy who pretended he was running a legit exchange and hedge fund, lied to lenders, spent customer's funds, acted like an altruist (while laughing about it being bullshit) and made dark political donations is a "scapegoat by the media"?
Yes. All of those should have required proof, they are required to require proof. In the normal world, it is not possible to commit even 10k$ fraud without the signoff of 5 people, so why is a billion dollars in the hands of a 26-year-old different.
I wouldn't call SBF a scapegoat. Lots of startups took VC money and didn't go on to allegedly commit fraud. Startups' business models might have been overly optimistic and VCs didn't pay enough attention, but that's not really on trial, here.
The point of scapegoats is that the scapegoat is actually sinless, and the sins of others are transferred onto the goat to be sacrificed. SBF is not sinless, he's getting what he deserves. He will be punished for his own crimes, not for the crimes of others. In no conceivable way is he a scapegoat.
Other exchanges run by other people also committed crimes, but those crimes aren't what SBF is on trial for. He's on trial for his own crimes.
SBF aside, I don't think it's true that a scapegoat must be sinless. Actually I think that's impossible, as the expression goes "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them which will hang him". In fact I think the best scapegoats have some objective fault which lets you seed the blame for them more easily.
SBF aside, I don't think it's true that a scapegoat must be sinless.
It's an Old Testament thing, the original meaning can easily be looked up. Some take the scapegoat as a metaphor for the New Testament Jesus (who is viewed as sinless by most followers). Ergo, we lay the sins of the community upon the innocent goat, and send him out in to the desert.
Regardless, I'll give you that goats can be ornery little fuckers, but I don't think they do a lot of "sinning" in the biblical sense.
I'm aware that it's a biblical idea, but even in the biblical sense, is it explicitly specified that the goat being without sin is relevant to its ability to be a scapegoat, aside from the fact that animals are incapable of sin as far as Christians are concerned?
Regardless, clearly the colloquial definition is what the original poster was referring to anyway, since any Christian must necessarily believe that SBF along with every other human alive today is subject to original sin. So it's a useless term for any practical purpose if you believe that scapegoats must be sinless and are talking in a strictly biblical sense.
The goat is without sin insofar as the humans are concerned, the sins in question are unambiguously those committed by the people, not the goat. If the goat committed his own goaty sins, that's irrelevant. Those hypothetical goat sins are unknown to the humans and don't factor into the goat's execution.
In the figurative or colloquial sense of the expression, a scapegoat is a person being punished for something other people did. They might also be a bad person in other unrelated ways, but what makes them a scapegoat is the part where they're punished for something they didn't do, for something other people did. You cannot be a scapegoat if you actually did the thing you're being punished for.
In both cases, the scapegoat is punished for something somebody else did. The biblical meaning and the colloquial meaning align neatly, there is no meaningful distinction here. SBF is to be punished for his own crimes, not for the crimes of other cryptobros, so he is not in any sense a scapegoat. Not in the biblical sense, nor in the colloquial sense.
No. I am speaking in both the biblical and colloquial sense. If you did a crime and get punished for it, you are not a scapegoat in the colloquial sense just because other people also committed similar crimes.
Suppose I'm a bank robber. The feds catch me and and throw me in jail, but they fail or neglect to catch some other bank robbers. Am I a scapegoat in the colloquial sense? No. I'm not a scapegoat because I am in fact a bank robber being punished for bank robbery. I'm not being punished for the bank robberies perpetrated by other bank robbers, I'm being punished for my own crimes. Since SBF will be punished for his own crimes, not for the crimes of other cryptobros, he is not a scapegoat in any sense.
If you collaborated with other bank robbers, and they intentionally arranged it so that you would take most or all of the punishment while allowing them to escape free, then I think most would describe that as scapegoating you (even though part of the blame really does lie on you for participating in the scheme).
I don't really know or care about the specifics of the SBF case and I'm not saying this applies to SBF. All I am saying is that at least two people in this discussion disagree with your understanding of the colloquial definition (me and the person you originally replied to with this criticism). So on that basis alone I don't think you have a right to be so assured in your definition.
Suppose you have office space in the jail, and give him (or anyone else) the opportunity to apply for remote jobs at anyplace willing to hire him - with the caveat that he loses office access unless he demonstrates that he's maximizing his potential to earn money, all of which will go directly to compensating victims. (Assume that he can't have Zoom calls with arbitrary colleagues of his choice. He can only have Zoom calls with Bill Lumbergh.)
I find such white-collar crimes very interesting because of the math between crime and punishment.
For the crime that SBF is alleged to have committed, we can reasonably expect 20 yrs (he will be out in 10-12). But if he had committed a murder, he would be in prison for life (no parole).
Mathematically speaking, this implies that a life is worth more than fraud worth 8 billion dollars. We can make a very reasonable assumption that the govt can save 1 additional life using a million dollars (giving necessary treatment to drug addicts / suicidal people / etc). Out of the 8 billion dollars from SBF, government would have got at least 50 million dollars from taxes (this is a lower bound). Out of that 50 million, maybe the govt puts 10-20 million back for public good. So the govt could have saved at least 10-20 people from the money that SBF is alleged to have defrauded.
Based on the above, can we say that SBF indirectly killed 10-20 people? What would be the punishment for someone who kills 10-20 people? Surely more than 20 years.
This balance between the scale of crime and the severity of punishment can be very interesting. Should someone defrauding 2 billion dollars suffer twice the punishment of someone defrauding 1 billion dollars? What about 2 murders to 1 murder? What about numbers on scale that can change an economy (what SBF did)?
For example, how did you determine that he’d get about half of a 20 year sentence? Particularly given federal crimes require a minimum of 85% time served.
Is this just your feelings disguised as fact or is backed by anything concrete?
There must be some rationale while setting penalties. As for reasoning, what other reasoning is there except arbitrarily deciding penalties? That's just guessing the punishment for various crimes. There must be some math behind the decision.
?? The basis of my argument was that the govt can save 1 person with a million dollars (by helping drug addicts, people with mental health issues, suicidal people, etc).
People aren't money but money can be converted to saved lives.
Economists love putting numbers on lives, but at the end of the day even if it was a lot of funny money it was funny money in an unregulated and uninsured market that the investors risked investing fully knowing those risks. It’s not really murder and it’s not really going to save any lives either because it would never have been used for that purpose. I get the sentiment, but it just doesn’t work that way.
