Sam Bankman-Fried to testify in fraud trial, attorney says

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will testify in his criminal fraud trial and could do so this week, his attorney has informed the court on Wednesday.

The trial is currently in its fourth week and has already witnessed the testimony of Bankman-Fried's former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, who once served as the CEO of FTX's sister firm, Alameda Research, Politico reported. In January of this year, he pleaded not guilty to a litany of charges related to the sudden collapse of his cryptocurrency firm.

Ellison agreed to cooperate with prosecutors after pleading guilty to criminal fraud charges in December 2022.

FTX suffered the equivalent of a bank run that November, when investors simultaneously lost faith in the firm and attempted to withdraw their stakes, leaving the firm unable to fully remunerate them. He agreed to be extradited from the Bahamas in December of 2022.

His successor as FTX CEO, John J. Ray III, told Congress that month that the company lacked any significant internal safeguards whatsoever.

"The issue here I was speaking to is I've never seen an utter lack of record keeping, absolutely no internal controls whatsoever," he said at the time. "It's one of the worst from a documentation standpoint. Even in the most failed companies you have a fair roadmap of what happened. We're dealing with literally, sort of a paperless bankruptcy, in terms of how they created the company."

Until August of this year, Bankman-Fried had been on house arrest at his parents' California home. U.S. District Judge Judge Lewis A. Kaplan later revoked his bail due to prosecutor claims he had attempted to intimidate a witness.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.