Crypto influencer Tiffany Fong who lost $250,000 to fraud scheme similar to FTX says Sam Bankman-Fried DOESN’T deserve life in prison

Tiffany Fong, a crypto investor and influencer, has said she doesn’t think disgraced ex-FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried deserves a life sentence.

Not only did she spend dozens of hours talking to Bankman-Fried while he was under house arrest, Fong is one of the most high-profile victims of another crypto collapse.

As of June 2022, Fong had about a quarter of a million dollars in Celsius, a crypto company that often marketed itself as safer than banks. In an instant, her money was gone. Bankruptcy was filed a month later.

But despite her losses, she believes Bankman-Fried – the head of another failed cryptocurrency – does not deserve to be locked up for life. He is currently awaiting sentencing, scheduled for Thursday in court in Manhattan.

“It was a big chunk of my savings,” Fong told DailyMail.com. “I was just very emotionally distraught afterward and wanted to have an outlet, so that’s the only reason I started covering these foreclosures.”

Sam Bankman-Fried (left) leaves Manhattan federal court in New York. Alex Mashinsky (right) founder and former CEO of Celsius Network Ltd., during a panel session at the Blockchain Week Summit in Paris, France

Celsius, like FTX, left a long trail of victims.

The fall of the FTX, which brought an abrupt halt to filming, occurred months before the FTX was scheduled to close. When founder Alex Mashinsky was arrested in July 2023, the SEC filed a lawsuit calling Celsius’ business model “unsustainable.”

Fong said she took to social media almost immediately after losing her money. Now she has about 110,000 followers on X and just over 45,000 subscribers on YouTube.

She uses her social platforms to keep people informed about crypto-related matters.

Over a year later, her work has led to her developing a close bond with Bankman-Fried. Fong said she is still in touch with him and has published long, recorded interviews with the crypto founder in the past.

She was also the first to originally publish an image of Bankman-Fried in prison, posing on a wall with other inmates who colloquially call him ‘G Lock’.

Fong visited Bankman-Fried at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California, in December 2022. They talked about his uncomfortable time in the notoriously brutal Bahamian prison Fox Hill, where Fong said he struggled with a lack of mental stimulation.

At the time, Fong said Bankman-Fried’s strategy for dealing with a possible life sentence was to not think about it too much.

Fong said, “He is aware of the possibility of a prison sentence, but it appears he does not want to think extensively about the worst-case scenario: a lifetime in prison.”

Tiffany Fong doesn’t want Bankman-Fried to get zero prison time, but thinks ‘anything even close to life is too far’

She was also the first to originally publish an image of Bankman-Fried in prison, posing on a wall with other inmates who colloquially call him ‘G Lock’.

Speaking about the sentences that Bankman-Fried and Celsius’ Mashinsky should receive, she told DailyMail.com: ‘I understand that most people have the impulse to want to see them in prison for life.

“I understand that this seems to be the general sentiment among the public, but I guess personally I’m just not a very vindictive or vindictive person.

“So I was personally more focused on how much money I could actually get back.”

Fong does not want Bankman-Fried or Mashinsky to go free. She said she never advocated for zero prison time for Bankman-Fried.

At the same time, she doesn’t think non-violent offenders, such as white-collar criminals, deserve life sentences.

“For me, the main point of a long prison sentence should be to protect the safety of the public… so that the people I want to see get life sentences are violent criminals like rapists, pedophiles, murderers, and so on. everyone safe,” Fong told DailyMail.com.

However, she does believe that Bankman-Fried and perpetrators like him should probably be excluded from participating in the financial services sector again.

Tiffany Fong poses with President Joe Biden in December 2022

Fong visited Bankman-Fried at his parents’ home in Palo Alto, California in December 2022

Fong said part of her sympathetic stance on the sentence stems from her own mental health issues.

“I understand that some people argue that these are violent crimes, obviously because some people might have taken their own lives, and I have a lot of empathy for that position.”

Similar sentiments to Fong’s were present in the series of victim impact statements the court received last week.

A significant number of people didn’t even mention Bankman-Fried by name. Instead, many of them listed the assets they had on FTX, how much money they estimated they lost in the collapse, and urged the court to set a fair restitution amount.

One person wrote: ‘All my hard-earned savings were invested in bitcoin on the FTX platform, hoping to secure a better future for my family and myself.

‘However, the actions of SBF and FTX have dashed those hopes. The scam has caused enormous emotional distress.”