HERO TO ZERO

He used pop stars, politicians and supermodels to convince the world to buy into his dodgy cryptocurrency scheme now fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried faces up to 110 years behind bars

- TOM LEONARD

A TOP firm of Silicon Valley investors once boldly predicted that Sam Bankman-Fried could become the world's "first trillionaire".

And yet the young business guru apparently disdained wealth. Pledging to give his money away, he famously only ever wore baggy shorts and old T-shirts, even when sharing a debating stage with heavyweights such as former American president Bill Clinton and former British prime minister Tony Blair.

But now the heady talk of trillions and saving the planet has imploded in one of the biggest financial frauds on record. And the sloppily dressed American cryptocurrency entrepreneur, who was hailed by the business world as "an autistic genius" and up to a year ago was gracing the covers of respected finance magazines, has a new uniform - a prison-issue one.

In an extraordinary fall from grace for a tech-world golden boy whose business empire went from $25 billion (R450bn) to virtually nothing in a matter of days, 31-year-old "SBF", as he's known, is facing up to 110 years behind bars.

After a month-long trial, a jury in Manhattan recently took just over four hours to find him guilty on all seven counts of stealing from customers of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.

Prosecutors told the court that Bankman-Fried portrayed himself as a high-minded altruist whose goal was to make billions from digital currencies so he could help the world when in fact he was a shameless crook whose company was little more than a Ponzi scheme.

"The crypto industry might be new, the players like Sam Bankman-Fried may be new, but this kind of fraud is as old as time and we have no patience for it," senior prosecutor Damian Williams intoned outside court after the guilty verdict was given earlier this month.