Sam Bankman-Fried asks U.S. Supreme Court to overturn FTX fraud conviction and $11 billion forfeiture

Sam Bankman-Fried has taken his fight over the FTX collapse to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to overturn his fraud conviction and challenge an approximately $11 billion forfeiture order. For high-risk operators, the interesting part is not the celebrity defendant angle; it is the familiar mix of customer-fund handling, bankruptcy recovery arguments, and the court’s view of what evidence a jury is allowed to hear.

1. Bankman-Fried filed his petition on Thursday after a 2023 conviction that left him serving a 25-year prison sentence. His lawyers are also challenging the roughly $11 billion forfeiture, and the Supreme Court first has to decide whether it will hear the case at all. The court gets thousands of such requests each year and hears arguments in about 60 cases.
2. The petition attacks two main pieces of the judgment. On the conviction side, the defense says the trial court wrongly blocked evidence about whether FTX customers ultimately recovered their money. On the forfeiture side, the argument is that the roughly $11 billion order is excessive under the Eighth Amendment.
3. Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy after a monthlong federal jury trial. In June, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the judgment. The appellate court said the case involved FTX and Alameda Research, the cryptocurrency trading firm that Bankman-Fried operated and controlled.
4. His lawyers say FTX and Alameda had enough assets to repay customers and that limits on evidence about those assets deprived him of a fair trial. They point to FTX’s bankruptcy plan, under which virtually all creditors were promised cash payments, including interest, to recover their losses.
5. Federal prosecutors and the Second Circuit took the opposite view: that FTX customers were defrauded through Bankman-Fried’s handling of their money, including the misappropriation of billions of dollars in customer funds. The court said the government’s trial theory was that customer funds were supposed to stay secure on the platform and be used only for cryptocurrency transactions, but were transferred to Alameda and elsewhere for unauthorized purposes.

Online records from the Office of the Pardon Attorney show that Bankman-Fried also has a pending pardon request to President Trump. He founded FTX in 2019, grew it into one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, and became one of the world’s youngest billionaires and a top Democratic donor before the company collapsed in 2022 after a run on deposits forced it into bankruptcy. He was later arrested in the Bahamas, where he had been living, and extradited to the U.S.