FTX chief executive blasts Sam Bankman-Fried for claiming fraud victims will not suffer

abcnews.go.com:

The chief executive of the cryptocurrency company Sam Bankman-Fried founded attacked the onetime crypto power player in a letter to a federal judge, saying his claim that customers, lenders and investors were not harmed was callously false

NEW YORK — The chief executive of the cryptocurrency company Sam Bankman-Fried founded attacked the onetime crypto power player on Wednesday in a letter to a federal judge scheduled to sentence him next week, saying his claim that customers, lenders and investors were not harmed was callously false and he was living a “life of delusion.”

FTX Trading Limited CEO John J. Ray III told Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that Bankman-Fried's victims have suffered and continue to suffer from his crimes.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion. The ‘business’ he left on November 11, 2022 was neither solvent nor safe. Vast sums of money were stolen by Mr. Bankman-Fried, and he was rightly convicted by a jury of his peers,” Ray wrote.

Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November on fraud and conspiracy charges, nearly a year after his December 2022 extradition from the Bahamas to New York for trial. Once touted as a cryptocurrency trailblazer, his companies collapsed in November 2022, less than a year after Bankman-Fried reached a pinnacle that included a Super Bowl advertisement, celebrity endorsements and congressional testimony.

Ray said he wanted to “correct material misstatements and omissions” in a sentencing submission in which a lawyer for Bankman-Fried wrote that statements made during a recent bankruptcy proceeding showed that the “harm to customers, lenders, and investors is zero” because FTX was solvent when it entered bankruptcy proceedings.

“As the lead professional of a very