What to Know About the Case Against Sam Bankman-Fried: QuickTake

After the demise of his FTX crypto empire in November, Sam Bankman-Fried portrayed himself as a hapless but well-intentioned chief executive who made a series of calamitous mistakes, but never knowingly committed fraud. Regulators aren’t buying it. A day after his arrest in the Bahamas, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed civil and criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, including that he had orchestrated a scheme to bilk equity investors out of more than $1.8 billion. Here’s what we know so far.

1. What was FTX?

It had grown into a sprawling ...