Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded and led FTX until a liquidity crunch forced the cryptocurrency exchange to declare bankruptcy, has been arrested in The Bahamas after being criminally charged by United States prosecutors.
It marks a stunning fall from grace for the 30-year-old entrepreneur who rode a cryptocurrency boom to create one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges and a net worth that Forbes pegged a year ago at $US26.5 billion ($A39.3 billion).
The exchange, launched in 2019 and based in The Bahamas, filed for bankruptcy on November 11 after it struggled to raise money to stave off collapse as traders rushed to withdraw $US6 billion ($A8.9 billion) from the platform in 72 hours.
The attorney general’s office for The Bahamas said it proceeded with the arrest after receiving formal confirmation of charges against Bankman-Fried, adding it expects he will be extradited to the US.
A statement from The Bahamas Police said Bankman-Fried had been arrested about 6pm Monday (2300 GMT) at his apartment complex, located in Albany, Nassau, in The Bahamas.
“He was arrested reference to various Financial Offences against laws of the United States, which are also offences against laws of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas,” the statement said, adding he was taken into custody without incident and will appear in Nassau’s Magistrate Court on Tuesday.
A spokesman for the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan confirmed Bankman-Fried had been arrested in The Bahamas but declined to comment on the charges.
“Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the US Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York,” United States prosecutor Damian Williams said in a statement.
“We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time.”
Mark Cohen, a lawyer for Bankman-Fried, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bankman-Fried’s indictment by US authorities comes as the Department of Justice is considering charges against a far bigger player in the crypto world, industry-leading exchange Binance.
Reuters reported Monday that some Justice Department prosecutors believe they have gathered sufficient evidence in their long-running investigation of Binance to charge the company and some top executives.
A Binance spokesperson told Reuters in relation to the story: “We don’t have any insight into the inner workings of the US Justice Department, nor would it be appropriate for us to comment if we did.”
Binance is under investigation for possible money laundering and sanctions violations, Reuters has reported.
The arrest also came a day ahead of Bankman-Fried’s scheduled appearance before US lawmakers on Tuesday, where he was planning to give testimony via a video link.
The US House Financial Services Committee was scheduled to hear from Bankman-Fried and current FTX CEO John Ray during the first in a series of hearings to examine the collapse of FTX beginning.
FTX’s liquidity crunch came after Bankman-Fried secretly moved $US10 billion ($A15 billion) of FTX customer funds to his proprietary trading firm, Alameda Research, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
At least $US1 billion ($A1.5 billion) in customer funds had vanished, the people said.
Bankman-Fried told Reuters the company did not “secretly transfer” but rather misread its “confusing internal labelling”.
Asked about the missing funds, he responded: “???”
Bankman-Fried resigned as FTX’s chief executive officer the same day as the bankruptcy filing.
