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The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

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Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#591
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that trial a bit politicized yu think? serious question

Not particularly. He had gained notoriety due to other behavior (raising drug prices to fund other drug research, his attitude during his Congressional testimony and media appearances, etc.), but it sounds like his fraud [or whatever he was specifically found guilty of] was very cut-and-dry against SEC and other relevant rules.

"On December 17, 2015, Shkreli was arrested by the FBI after a federal indictment in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York was filed, charging him with securities fraud. The charges were filed after an investigation into his tenure at MSMB Capital Management and Retrophin. U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said, "Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company."

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have already looked into this, and the claims on FTX' debt were valued at 5c on the dollar. Alameda has burned through billions, and most of what was left were illiquid shitcoins and other worthless junk. Madoff, at least, was dealing with real assets.

> burned through billions If Alameda lost the billions, then who won the billions? Who was on the other side of those trades?

A lot of it is probably stolen. A lot went into thousands of worthless altcoins and their devs got rich. Another big portion is probably advertising. They spent big on YouTube influencers. Basically a lot of people got rich and a lot more people got screwed.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#593

Can we discus recovery? The Madoff trustee was able to recover something like 90% of the Madoff Ponzi. Alameda and FTX's real estate purchases have value, as do their VC investments, purchases of bank stock, etc. In other words, it's not all gone. My understanding is that even some of the political contributions can be clawed back. FTX's purchases of IOU's (i.e., crypto) that declined in value are not likely to be re…

A lot was lost to traders whose profits came out of FTX's losses from market making.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#594
post #354

Direct link to PDF without Javascript: curl -s https://www.docdroid.net/kxfZltq/unsealed-indictment-in-us-v-bankman-fried-22-cr-673-abrams-as-sam-bankman-fried-of-ftx-heads-to-sdny-echoes-of-onecoin-and-un-bribery-cases-pdf \ |tr -d '\134'|sed -n 's/u0026/\&/g;s/.*\"application\/pdf\",\"uri\":\"//;s/\".*//;/https:/p' Q+D script using curl to download from "DocDroid" #!/bin/sh read X Y; unset Y;Y=${X##*/}; echo "$X" \…

This is an interesting way of writing a quick and dirty script, completely different than I would have written it (I would have definitely have used a lot more subshells, temporary variables, escaped the characters in the commands, "#" in sed instead of "/" and a lot less sed magic). If anyone is curious as it took me a bit to decipher (and I consider myself quite familiar with shell scripting!): read X Y Read the st…

   read X Y
"Read the stdin into X and Y. I'm honestly not sure why read Y here as it's unset and re-defined on the next line?"

You can drop the Y but then if you unintentionally have anything after the URL on stdin the script will break.

   unset Y;Y=${X##*/}; 
"Unset Y, use Parameter expansion to match the regex "/" greedy and delete it from the string, assign it to Y. Also I believe that using "" here is a "bashism" so it would not work on a strict posix shell :)"

There is no regex. This is globbing. It is a shell feature sometimes called "Parameter Expansion". This will delete everything up to "/".

I am not a bash user. I use NetBSD ash as both the interactive and scripting shell.

   |curl -4sK- \ 
"Connect over ipv4 (-4), don't output (-s, silent) and read the config from stdin (-K-). Apparently curl support reading what to fetch from a config file, I was not aware that curl supported that"

I only use curl in HN examples. I do not use it otherwise, so the -K- option is just a stupid hack to make curl behave more like the programs I actually use: yy025, nc and so on.

    |sed -n 's/u0026/\&/g;s/.*\"application\/pdf\",\"uri\":\"//;s/\".*//;s/https:/url=&/p' \
"Several substitutions, and don't echo the output automatically (-n). Replace "u0026" with "&" (u0026 is the unicode number of ampersand - not sure why but docdroid use that in their page), all occurrences. Select the line that matches '."application/pdf","uri":"' Match "https:" and prepend it with "url=", and print it"

This does not select the line that matches the pattern, it deletes everything up to that pattern in all* lines of the input. It then deletes everything after double quotes from all lines of the input.

Yes, I escaped the forward slashes. That adds some characters. Sometimes when dealing with URLs as input I will use a character that is not permitted in URLs as a separator, such as "". As a matter of course, I do not use "#" as a separator because, for me, it makes inline sed comments prefixed with "#" more difficult to distinguish. I also superfluously escaped the double quotes out of habit. No need in this case.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is opportunity cost. People invested in Madoff to grow their money. So if I invest $100 in Madoff and ten years later they say “we recovered $90, congrats,” yeah that’s better than nothing. But if I had put that into a legitimate investment, maybe I’d have $180. Other folks got money out of Madoff during his scam years, and the trustee says “I’m taking that money back to pay back others.” So much of crypt…

> Other folks got money out of Madoff during his scam years, and the trustee says “I’m taking that money back to pay back others.” What’s the limit on that? Dollars or time? I would be beyond furious if I was expected to help make someone else whole.

The trustee has to prove that the transferee lacked good faith, which includes “when the information the transferee learned would have caused a reasonable person in the transferee’s position to investigate the matter further.” The companies which were required to repay Madoff money had “uncovered facts suggesting that [Madoff] was engaged in fraudulent activity” as part of their due diligence. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-ca2-20-01333/pd...

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#596
post #572
post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be beyond furious if I was expected to help make someone else whole. Such are the wages of being a beneficiary of a ponzi scheme. It would be a good incentive to do better research.

How are you supposed to get enough insight from any working fund manager to determine whether something is a ponzi? It’s not like they give you access to the books.

Mutual fund and ETF holdings are public information. Random fund manager? Good luck.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not popular here, I would say Bezos has done a relatively good job of keeping his head amongst madness.

The popular wisdom is Amazon got into the video business entirely so Bezos could get dates with more actresses.

That may be a popular wisdom but it doesn't make sense. You really think a multi-billionaire who is moderately good-looking couldn't get a date? With literally anyone?

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They... literally... are? The SEC has charged SBF over exactly that.

IANAL but that depends on what their agreements with LPs were, doesn’t it? The managing partners have a fiduciary duty to the fund so couldn’t they be held criminally liable if they failed to do some due diligence stipulated by an LP?

Normally these things are all agreed at the time of the original commitment and the closing of the fund, so assuming there are LPs each and every one of them should have a copy of the obligations of these funds.

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#599
post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be beyond furious if I was expected to help make someone else whole. Such are the wages of being a beneficiary of a ponzi scheme. It would be a good incentive to do better research.

Madoff operated for close to twenty years before being exposed. He was regularly lauded for being the best by well informed people. What is an amateur supposed to do? If the argument is, “Nobody is that good, you should know better”, does that mean Buffet’s scheme will start crumbling any day now?

[deleted]

Re: The United States of America vs. Samuel Bankman-Fried Indictment [pdf]

#600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but they've been all over crypto: https://a16zcrypto.com/

Let's not forget this gem https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/...

The juxtaposition of the headline with the items above it from the present is interesting.
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