Prosecutors have agreed to withdraw five new charges

 

Prosecutors have agreed to withdraw five new charges made against cryptocurrency company FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.  Bankman-Fried is still set to stand trial in October on eight other charges, and he will be set to stand a second trial in early 2024 on the five counts withdrawn, which included bank fraud and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Bankman-Fried was arrested in December after the fall of FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. He was charged with multiple counts of fraud and was extradited from the Bahamas. The five charges were added after he was extradited, something that Bankman-Fried and his lawyers argued against. Bankman-Fried is charged with using billions of dollars of customer deposits to finance real estate purchases, donations, and additional crypto trading. He is currently under house arrest in his childhood home in Palo Alto, California.