Sam Bankman-Fried ordered to jail after judge says he's tampered with witnesses in crypto fraud trial

 A federal judge in New York revoked bail for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried after federal prosecutors argued successfully that he had tampered with witnesses in his billion-dollar cryptocurrency fraud trial.

U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ordered Bankman-Fried to a federal detention center after finding that he had reached out at least twice to witnesses in the case.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in December after FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, lost billions in value over accusations of fraudulent use of investor funds. He was ordered to stay at his parents’ Palo Alto, California, house on a $250 million bail package.

Prosecutors alleged that Bankman-Fried had made over 1,000 phone calls to reporters and had sent over 100 emails to the media. They said that in one of these instances, he leaked pages from the private diary of his girlfriend Caroline Ellison to the New York Times in an attempt to discredit her ahead of her testimony in the case. 

In December, Ellison pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges and is expected to be a star witness in the case against Bankman-Fried.

“Faced with a series of conditions meant to limit the defendant’s use of the internet and the phone, the defendant pivoted to in-person machinations,” said prosecutors. 

Bankman-Fried has previously claimed that he didn't intend to defraud investors but admitted that he had made mistakes.

"Whatever happened, why it happened, I had a duty to our stakeholders, our customers, our investors, the regulators of the world, to do right by them," he said. "Clearly I didn’t do a good job of that."

Bankman-Fried was estimated to be worth as much as $16 billion. On Friday, he was led from court to jail in handcuffs.

His court trial is scheduled to begin on Oct. 2.

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