- On day two of Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, the DOJ alleged that SBF deliberately lied to customers and stole billions of dollars.
- SBF’s defense team contends that SBF made “unsuccessful business decisions” but acted in good faith.
- The trial featured testimonies from two witnesses, a former FTX client and a former employee.
On the second day of Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) accused SBF of intentionally defrauding investors for personal gain, while the defense claimed that SBF only made “unsuccessful business decisions.”
On Wednesday, October 4, Nathan Rehn, an assistant US attorney, described Bankman-Fried saying, “He had wealth, he had power, he had influence, but all of that was built on lies.”
The DOJ mentioned in its opening statement that Bankman-Fried deliberately lied to customers, allegedly stealing billions of dollars from thousands of people. Whereas the defense team described the former FTX CEO as “a math nerd and a hard worker who acted in good faith.”
A prominent crypto journalist, Laura Shin, stated that the prosecution’s opening statement was clean and easy to follow, using simple words such as “lied or stole repeatedly.” Most of the jury isn’t familiar with crypto terminology, which many speculated that the defense would attempt to benefit from.
Furthermore, the prosecutors claimed that SBF was using FTX “to commit fraud on a massive scale,” and the money he spent “to build his empire was money he was stealing from his customers.”
The second day of Bankman-Fried’s trial saw testimonials from two witnesses, Marc-Antoine Julliard and Adam Yedidia. Julliard is a former client of FTX, and Yedidia was a friend of Bankman-Fried and a former employee of Alameda Research and FTX.
Julliard purchased on the FTX exchange, and he explained that he conducted due diligence before deciding to use FTX; however, he had lost approximately $150,000 worth of crypto. Julliard shared in his testimony that before FTX filed for bankruptcy, he didn’t withdraw his funds because SBF made public statements that customer assets were safe.
The second person to testify in SBF’s trial was Yedidia, who called himself a close friend of Bankman-Fried. Yedidia worked at FTX as a software engineer but said he had resigned immediately upon learning that Alameda had used FTX customer deposits to repay Alameda’s loans.
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