Sam Bankman-Fried asks US Supreme Court to overturn his fraud conviction and $11 billion forfeiture

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of FTX, has asked the US Supreme Court to take up his challenge to a 2023 fraud conviction and an $11 billion forfeiture order. His lawyer, Jeffrey Fisher of Hecker Fink LLP, filed the petition for review on September 10 after Bankman-Fried lost his appeal in the Second Circuit.

The case follows the collapse of FTX in November 2022 and a jury’s conviction of Bankman-Fried the following year on seven felony fraud counts involving the misuse of customer funds. He received a 25-year prison sentence and was ordered to forfeit $11 billion.

The legal dispute now turns on two questions. Bankman-Fried’s petition challenges lower-court treatment of evidence indicating that customers lost money, and says the $11 billion order breaches the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause.

His argument on forfeiture is that the sum bears no reasonable relationship to the actual losses or gains attributable to the offences. Prosecutors had treated the full value of customer deposits, approximately $11 billion when the exchange collapsed in November 2022, as proceeds of the fraud.

The Second Circuit rejected that position in June 2026. It held that whether Bankman-Fried had the funds and intended to repay FTX victims was immaterial as a matter of law.

The appellate court also upheld the forfeiture. It found no clear error in the district court’s calculation and concluded that the amount was not grossly disproportional to the gravity of the offence. The court noted that the fraud involved billions of dollars and affected hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.

Supreme Court rules required Bankman-Fried to file a petition for a writ of certiorari within 90 days of an appellate decision. The court initially gave the US government until October 15 to respond, then extended that deadline to November 16.

Whether the court will hear the case remains unresolved. It grants review in fewer than 2% of petitions received each term. If review is granted, Fisher said a decision could arrive in the current term, which ends in June 2027, though he cautioned that the schedule could slip.

For FTX customers, the dispute concerns an order connected to money lost in the exchange’s collapse. Many users began receiving repayments in 2025.