Prosecutors Ask Judge to Tighten Bail Conditions on Sam Bankman-Fried

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Federal prosecutors in Manhattan stated on Friday that the disgraced cryptocurrency government Sam Bankman-Fried had tried to contact a possible witness in his legal case, and so they requested a choose to impose new bail circumstances limiting his potential to speak with former colleagues.

In a court docket submitting, the U.S. legal professional’s workplace for the Southern District of New York stated Mr. Bankman-Fried despatched messages over e-mail and the encrypted messaging app Sign this month to the final counsel of the U.S. arm of FTX, the cryptocurrency change he based. Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30, has been charged with fraud, cash laundering and marketing campaign finance violations linked to the implosion of FTX final 12 months.

The communication was “suggestive of an effort to affect Witness-1’s potential testimony,” the submitting stated. “That is notably regarding provided that the defendant is conscious that Witness-1 has info that will are inclined to inculpate the defendant.”

Prosecutors requested Choose Lewis A. Kaplan, who’s overseeing Mr. Bankman-Fried’s case, to ban the entrepreneur from contacting present and former FTX workers or utilizing Sign or different encrypted apps to speak.

A spokesman for Mr. Bankman-Fried didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Mr. Bankman-Fried constructed FTX into one of many greatest cryptocurrency exchanges on this planet earlier than the corporate filed for chapter in November. He was arrested in December at his residence within the Bahamas, the place FTX was primarily based, after which extradited to the US to face the legal expenses. Choose Kaplan granted him bail underneath extremely restrictive circumstances, confining him to his dad and mom’ residence close to the campus of Stanford College in Northern California.

Mr. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not responsible to the fees in opposition to him.

From his residence confinement, Mr. Bankman-Fried has entertained guests, together with the writer Michael Lewis, who’s writing a e-book about him. He has additionally began mounting a protection, writing posts on Substack that element his model of the occasions main as much as FTX’s collapse.

Based on Friday’s submitting, Mr. Bankman-Fried wrote to the final counsel of FTX U.S. on Jan. 15, saying he would “actually like to reconnect and see if there’s a means for us to have a constructive relationship, use one another as sources when doable, or a minimum of vet issues with one another.”

Prosecutors stated the witness “has firsthand data of the defendant’s conduct through the charged conspiracies” and took part in communications on Sign and the messaging system Slack with a small group of insiders the month that FTX collapsed. Mr. Bankman-Fried has additionally contacted different present and former FTX workers, in response to the submitting.

The doc doesn’t establish the witness by identify. The final counsel of FTX U.S. is Ryne Miller, in response to his LinkedIn web page.

For a lot of his tenure at FTX, Mr. Bankman-Fried relied on Sign, which supplies individuals the choice to robotically delete messages. Based on prosecutors, he additionally directed workers of FTX and Alameda Analysis, a hedge fund he based, to set their communications to robotically disappear after 30 days or much less.

“The autodeletion of FTX and Alameda’s Slack and Sign communications has impeded the federal government’s investigation,” the submitting stated. “Potential witnesses have described related and incriminating conversations with the defendant that occurred on Slack and Sign which have already been autodeleted.”

Within the court docket submitting, prosecutors stated Mr. Bankman-Fried’s use of Sign might hinder their efforts to find out whether or not he tried to contact extra potential witnesses throughout his confinement.

“The proposed bail circumstances together would extra successfully forestall the defendant from obstructing justice,” the submitting stated.

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