Michael Saylor - who has quite a colorful history himself - does a very reasonable job of explaining at a summary level what SBF and FTX did.
I understand people may want to discount Saylor's input because he could arguably be conflicted. And he has had some accounting problems in the past. But his description of how SBF loaned himself (or his controlled entities) billions on a basis no reputable bank would ever contemplate is illuminating. Is lending yourself 100x what any commercial bank would do using tradable "assets" as collateral fraud? I think so if you are receiving depositors money from the exchange committed to holding the depositors money as their own. Worse yet if the collateralized assets are created by the entity and of dubious value (Saylor's and Marc Cohodes's assessments). This is what the CEO of the CME also referred to when he questioned the fact of essentially no margin call practices at FTX, which caused a Congressman to question his veracity. Bad move by the Congressman. The facts line up terribly against FBX right now.
One rumor that has arisen - and it has yet to be verified amidst FTX's horrible bookkeeping (John Ray) - is that depositors did not actually have any interest in the crypto being traded on the exchange. If this is true, and it is too early too tell, that this is really no different than a Madoff situation, where scraps of paper were all that reflected a so-called investment. The mere fact that this question has been raised is bad news.
I assume Carmine9 that you somehow believe that SBF is jurisdictionally protected because he was by and large operating outside the US? Not sure about that - in my experience - the DOJ's strongest suit is typically on jurisdictional and procedure matters. There were a number of investors here in the US which were burned. A nexus to the US will likely be demonstrated. A complex case, to be sure - that won't move as fast as it should - but not a case for optimism for SBF. And note while SBF has enjoyed political protection few others can obtain, but that won't hold up in the case of a widespread fraud (echoes of a call from Ken Lay to the Bush Administration during the Enron scandal).
As a final note - watch Silvergate.
