Bankman-Fried Pleads Not Guilty as FTX Criminal Case Expands to 13 Counts

FTX founder Samuel Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court on March 30, 2023 to superseding indictments that expanded the criminal case against him to 13 counts.

The Southern District of New York’s minute entry records that Bankman-Fried appeared before U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan with attorneys Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell. He was arraigned on the indictments identified as S3 and S5 and entered not-guilty pleas to both. The proceeding formally put five counts added after his January 3 plea into dispute.

Those additions comprised substantive commodities-fraud and securities-fraud counts, conspiracies to commit bank fraud and operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, and a conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Eight earlier counts concerned alleged fraud against FTX customers and investors, fraud against Alameda Research lenders, money laundering and campaign-finance violations.

The pleas were procedural denials, not findings about the accusations. Bankman-Fried remained presumed innocent, and none of the government’s allegations had been adjudicated on March 30.

The latest allegation concerned cryptocurrency payments

The S5 indictment, filed on March 28, alleged that Chinese law-enforcement authorities froze Alameda cryptocurrency accounts on two unnamed exchanges in early 2021. Prosecutors valued the assets in those accounts at approximately $1 billion, without identifying the instruments, valuation timestamp or pricing source.

According to the indictment, Bankman-Fried and people acting at his direction tried several methods to regain access, including hiring lawyers, contacting the exchanges and creating accounts using other people’s identifying information. Prosecutors alleged that, after those efforts failed, Bankman-Fried authorized cryptocurrency transfers intended to influence one or more Chinese government officials.

The filing alleged that approximately $40 million in cryptocurrency was transferred from an Alameda trading account to a private wallet in November 2021. It further alleged that the frozen accounts were unlocked around that time and that additional cryptocurrency worth tens of millions of dollars was subsequently transferred.

Those figures were prosecutorial valuations tied to alleged transfers and account balances, not independently audited amounts or Coinburn calculations. The indictment did not name the exchanges, officials, wallet, assets or price methodology. It also did not establish that the timing of the account release proved why the accounts were unfrozen.

The four February counts widened the institutional questions

The S3 indictment filed on February 23 had already broadened the case beyond the eight-count indictment unsealed in December 2022. Its added bank-fraud conspiracy concerned allegations that an Alameda-controlled entity called North Dimension obtained a bank account by representing that it would be used for trading and market making, while the account allegedly received and transmitted FTX customer funds.

The unlicensed-money-transmission count addressed the same payment infrastructure from a different statutory direction. The two substantive market-fraud counts supplemented existing conspiracy allegations concerning FTX customers who traded or intended to trade securities and commodity-linked instruments.

Together, the additions mattered because they framed the alleged conduct as more than an exchange-custody failure. Prosecutors were testing theories involving banking access, money transmission, regulated financial instruments, political finance and foreign bribery within one crypto-company prosecution. Each theory carried distinct elements that the government would still have to prove.

What the court decided on March 30

The court applied the existing bail order to the S5 indictment, set May 8 for defense motions, May 29 for the government’s opposition and June 12 for defense replies. A hearing or pretrial conference was scheduled for June 15, while the trial remained scheduled for October 2.

Defense counsel told the court that the not-guilty pleas did not concede that Bankman-Fried legally could be tried on the newer charges. The March 30 record did not resolve that objection, the truth of the allegations or the admissibility of the government’s anticipated evidence. It established the narrower but consequential development: all 13 counts were contested, and the expanded FTX prosecution was moving into pretrial litigation.