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by privatelypublic 267 days ago
What are you thinking the crime would be? He bet his company on a literal toss of the dice instead of the routine figurative ones.

Outside of Bribery and ?SarBox? (Whichever regulation handles kickbacks, etc), I can't think of anything.

1 comments

If you spend investor money at a literal casino while advertising a non-casino related business, and pay the investors back, probably people will view you as not committing a crime.

If you get investor money or get a loan on the basis of funding logistics investments, bet it on roulette red, and go bankrupt, I would expect you'd be looking at hard jail time for fraud.

So I'm thinking the crime would be nothing, because he was a winner, and the optics totally changed, and fraud relies on very subjective opinions of a jury.

There are lots of examples of people going to jail despite investors getting their money back, like SBF and Shkreli. Even Madoff investors got 94% of their investments back.
Shkreli is the only one of those 3 that fully paid back his investors, and it took him pissing off virtually every politician and a bunch of wealthy insurance executives/administrators to get enough resources mobilized to get a conviction (and being one of the most uncharismatic people on earth, which didn't help him at trial).

I think you are definitely in a much worse place for a fraud conviction if you lose money.

News stories said SBF investors were going to get 118% of their money back. Did that not happen?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/08/ftx-crypto-fraud-victims-t...

No, those repayment numbers are what their crypto was worth at time of bankruptcy and interest is nowhere close to what you could have made just doing index fund on top of any damage done since they didn't have the money.

If I stole 1000 bucks from you 3 years ago and repaid 1080 back now, sure, you got some interest, but you still be pretty unhappy with not having access to that money. For some, lack of access to that money could have been extremely damaging.

No because the assets ('money') deposited to SBF were crypto, and you just gamified it by doing a currency exchange to USD while disingenuously failing to note that in that time the USD value of the crypto went up.

If you want an accurate reflection, note how much of the crypto deposited went in, and then how much came back out after SBF lost it.

This would be like me depositing USD, someone stealing some of it, then you bragging the value went up because I have a larger quantity as measured in Venezuelan Bolivars. What actually happened is their % they recouped was less than 100 until you artificially change to an entirely different currency.

Sure, if you believe crypto is a currency.