Sam Bankman-Fried should spend more than 40 years behind bars, say prosecutors

SAM Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, should be imprisoned until he's in his seventies, prosecutors have demanded.

The 32-year-old former billionaire was found guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in November and convicted of stealing $8 billion from FTX customers.

Prosecutors who secured the convictions are now asking for a prison term of between 40 and 50 years.

"Even now Bankman-Fried refuses to admit what he did was wrong," they said in a court document today as they look for $11 billion in forfeiture over the exchange's bankruptcy.

"His life in recent years has been one of unmatched greed and hubris; of ambition and rationalization; and courting risk and gambling repeatedly with other people's money."

Bankman-Fried's own lawyer - Marc Mukasey - meanwhile told US District Judge Lewis Kaplan that his client did not set out with the intention of stealing, and that a sentence between five and six-and-a-half years would be appropriate. In that time, he said, most FTX customers would have most of their lost funds returned.

Sentencing has been scheduled for Thursday March 28 at Manhattan Federal Court where it is understood Bankman-Fried - the son of Stanford Law School professors and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate - will appeal both conviction and sentence.

It was this elite education and privileged upbringing that has left prosecution lawyers calling for such a severe sentence.

"He knew what society deemed illegal and unethical, but disregarded that based on a pernicious megalomania guided by the defendant's own values and sense of superiority," they slammed.

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