So 4 counts on wire fraud and then also commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering and campaign finance laws. For the moment, if we set aside whether these will be proven, how bad does a stack of charges like this look for him if they are proven?
It depends on how much the court thinks he stole (of the billions). The US Sentencing Guidelines tops out at around $550 million dollars, which adds 30 levels. Plus some adjustments: 2 for using mass marketing or 4-6 for causing financial hardship (only one of these), 4 for being the leader of the organization.
The base for larceny is 6.
That gives 36 just based on the money, and up to 46. That's 15 years on the low end, and runs off the end of the table ("life") on the high.
In the federal system there is 15% time off for good behavior, so 15 years means 12.75 actually served.
I'm assuming here the counts run concurrently or group (which I think is more typical than sequential, and also gives lower numbers). The judge can depart from the guidelines and give a lower sentence but SBF is not in a good place right now.
From a quick google search (not promising this is 100% accurate, but I searched for sentencing minimums)
1) Wire fraud: 121-151 months
2) Securities fraud: 6-36 months base (there are multipliers apparently)
3) money laundering: 70 month average is all I could find
4) Campaign finance: seems to be more monetary based
Not sure how a plea deal/severity of charges would change this though. Ex: when you are committing billions in fraud that probably has different guidelines than the average securities fraud of a few million or whatever.
Fraud is a 2b1.1 crime, so the sentence scales with the "losses" to the victims; you can get +30 levels off that alone, which catapults the sentence into double digits.
It strikes me as a weakness in our system that this is keyed to the $ amount. You can defraud a person of modest means of $50,000 and wipe them out financially; you could defraud some rich people of $2 billion without it impacting them in the slightest. This strongly incentivizes preying on the weak.
Do you have evidence of banks stealing money from depositors and not being prosecuted?
We are in a comment section of an announcement of charges against a CEO of a βbankβ that did such and will face a lifetime in prison if convicted. Every example of a bank stealing from depositors I can find has people facing consequences. I guess that we would not hear about instances of people getting away with their crimes but that would make it not wide spread and rare or your claim unprovable due to a lack of evidence.
Opponents of politicians who took the money opponents will use it against them in future elections. Maybe some will return the money to attempt to defect that attack.
The cynic in me says that it really does matter who you defraud. Where Madoff went wrong was ripping off other rich people. So, if SBF defrauded more upper- than middle- or working-class folks, then he's screwed.
This is silly. You think the career DOJ prosecutors are looking at the list of victims and only deciding to prosecute if there is a rich person on the list?
A lot of the things that defraud non-wealthy people (multi-level marketing, all of those "supplements" you can buy in the medicine isle, false advertising) aren't illegal or practical to sue over.
Let's look at one particular example, the stop the steal scam. Thousands of people were tricked in to donating to the ringleaders of an impossible political cause based on false claims, and none of them are going to jail for that in particular. You could find dozens of similar examples just by keeping an eye on the news, but nobody thinks about it because a certain type of con with victims that professionals can't empathize with has become normalized.
In the US, we can't just convict people because they lost people money. You need to prove criminal intent. Are you aware of any evidence demonstrating intent to commit fraud?
Not sure what the size of banks has to do with anything.
Any evidence that specific executives at these rating agencies had the intent to defraud people by over-rating mortgage-backed securities? Simply being inept at your job is not necessarily criminal.
Eh, it feels like he may have donated a lot, but he wasn't crazy popular. Plus, not like he's had a long track record of donations over many years. I am not sure anyone with much influence will stick their neck out for someone like him
How does political corruption work? We would need to visit a party in Washington DC to be able to describe it precisely, but it probably can be summarized as βone hand washes the other.β
And also the money's gone (Probably). It's not like he has tonnes of money hidden away like other rich people on trial, so even if he gets bailed out by being buddies with the right people, it's not like he will make billions in campaign donations again any time soon.
