Group chats, tweets and audio tape: The evidence against FTX's Sam Bankman-fried

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Sam Bankman-Fried's words in tweets and group chats are being used as evidence against him in his historic fraud trial. Screenshots of messages, social media posts and internal documents have been presented by prosecutors to demonstrate how the 31-year-old allegedly orchestrated a multibillion-dollar scheme at his FTX cryptocurrency exchange, along with his trading firm Alameda Research. The documents offer a look into the mechanics of his alleged fraud as well as the discrepancies between his public statements and private instructions to his inner circle.

Former colleagues — including Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang — gave jurors insight on how to decipher the documents during their testimony at the federal courthouse in New York.

Prosecutors also played audio clips from a secretly recorded meeting of Ellison with Alameda employees in Hong Kong in the final week of the trading firm's collapse. Asked who made the decision to repay Alameda lenders with FTX customer funds, Ellison uttered, “Sam, I guess.”

In audio clips from a Nov. 9, 2022, Alameda all-hands meeting — days before the company filed for bankruptcy — Ellison spoke about the firm's troubles and told them it was likely to shut down. “The basic story here is that starting last year, Alameda was kind of borrowing a bunch of money via open-term loans and used that to make various illiquid investments,” she said on the tape. In cross-examination, Ellison was asked if she was admitting wrongdoing to the employees. “Yes, I was,” she said. While Alameda employees seemed upset about the wrongdoing, they were grateful she had been open and honest with them, she said. A former Alameda software engineer, Christian Drappi, told the court that Ellison was laughing nervously