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Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former chief executive of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, used his prison-managed X account on Monday, September 14, 2026, to push a fresh public argument in his last remaining criminal case fight, telling followers that prosecutors were allowed to place billions of dollars in customer losses before the jury while the defense was barred from answering.
The posts landed four days after his lawyers filed a petition asking the Supreme Court of the United States to review his 2023 fraud conviction, his 25-year prison sentence, and the roughly $11 billion forfeiture order tied to the case. The Court has not said whether it will hear the case.
The first message from the @SBF_FTX account went up at 18:55 UTC. A follow-up three minutes later sharpened the argument. “Michael Smerconish discusses my case and Supreme Court appeal,” the post read.
“Judge Kaplan allowed the government to (falsely) claim over $10 billion of depositor losses, and prohibited me from responding.” The post pointed to a YouTube interview published by the American radio and television commentator Michael Smerconish on September 10, 2026.
The clip, titled “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Lawyer: SBF Didn’t Get a Fair Trial,” features Jeffrey Fisher, the Stanford Law School professor leading Bankman-Fried’s Supreme Court petition. Fisher says the jury heard billions of dollars in loss figures while the defense was blocked from putting on evidence about expected creditor recoveries.
He also describes the $11 billion forfeiture as an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Smerconish had promoted the same interview on his own X feed on September 10, asking his audience whether the trial was fair and whether the penalty was constitutional.
What happened last week
The prison posts sit on top of a court filing from Thursday, September 10, 2026. On that day, Bankman-Fried’s legal team asked the Supreme Court to review the criminal case decided by a Manhattan federal jury in November 2023 and the sentence handed down the following spring. The Crypto Times reported the Supreme Court petition on September 11. The New York Times and CNN first reported the petition on September 10.
The defense argument in the filing is narrow. Prosecutors, it says, were allowed to put customer loss figures in front of the jury, while the defense was not allowed to show that FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research held, or later recovered, enough assets to repay account holders. Fisher has argued that the victims did not lose money in the sense that later bankruptcy distributions repaid claims with interest, and that the trial record did not let jurors hear that side of the story.
Prosecutors have rejected that framing since the sentencing hearing. They argued that Bankman-Fried misappropriated billions of dollars in customer funds whether or not money later flowed back through the bankruptcy estate. The criminal case also covered alleged fraud against FTX equity investors and lenders to Alameda Research, not only exchange depositors. At sentencing, prosecutors put customer losses near $8 billion.
The $11 billion figure is the forfeiture order. The “over $10 billion of depositor losses” line is Bankman-Fried’s characterization of what the government put before the jury.
How the case reached this point
FTX, once one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, collapsed in November 2022 after a rush of withdrawals that the platform could not meet. Federal prosecutors said Bankman-Fried had moved customer deposits to Alameda Research, the affiliated quantitative trading firm, and used the money for proprietary trading, venture investments, political donations, and personal spending.
A Manhattan federal jury convicted him on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023. On March 28, 2024, United States District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison and ordered forfeiture of roughly $11 billion, as The Crypto Times reported at the time of sentencing. Prosecutors placed customer losses close to $8 billion at that stage. Bankman-Fried has called the larger figures used around trial and sentencing false.
He continued to litigate after the sentence. In April 2026, Kaplan denied a pro se motion for a new trial filed by Bankman-Fried himself. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit then heard argument on November 4, 2025, and on June 12, 2026, affirmed the conviction, the sentence, and the forfeiture.
Circuit Judge Barrington D. Parker, writing for the three-judge panel, called the government’s evidence “robust” and said customers were defrauded as soon as their funds were transferred to Alameda Research, regardless of any belief by the defendant that the money might later be returned. The Crypto Times reported the Second Circuit ruling that day. The appeal was United States v. Bankman-Fried, No. 24-961.
The appellate opinion leaned on the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Kousisis v. United States, which held that a federal wire fraud conviction can stand even where a defendant did not intend a net economic loss. The new Supreme Court petition tries to invert that logic. If the government does not need to prove net loss to convict, the defense argues, it should not be permitted to place large loss figures before the jury while the accused is barred from answering.
What Bankman-Fried is saying now
Monday’s posts do not add a fresh legal filing. They repackage the same evidentiary fight for a wider audience. The @SBF_FTX account is operated through a Federal Bureau of Prisons-approved proxy, and the account biography states that posts go out by approved email and phone rather than by direct access to the platform.
The claim that “over $10 billion of depositor losses” was falsely presented tracks a defense theme used since trial: that FTX was illiquid rather than insolvent, and that later bankruptcy recoveries prove customers were made whole.
Distributions from the FTX bankruptcy estate have repaid large groups of creditors at or above their allowed claim value, although those payouts were generally tied to November 2022 dollar values, when bitcoin traded near $16,000. Bitcoin traded around $16,800 as FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022. Creditors and prosecutors continue to treat the original diversion of customer funds as the underlying crime.
Bankman-Fried also has a separate clemency track outside the courts. He applied for a presidential pardon on June 8, 2026. The United States Senate then adopted Senate Resolution 772 on July 15, 2026, a unanimous resolution opposing any grant of clemency in his case.
What happens next
A petition for a writ of certiorari, the technical name for asking the Supreme Court to hear a case, is only a request that the justices take up an appeal. The court grants review in a small share of filings, roughly 1% in a typical term. A decision on whether to hear Bankman-Fried’s appeal is expected later in 2026. If the petition is denied, the conviction, the 25-year sentence, and the roughly $11 billion forfeiture will stand as entered by the trial court.
The Smerconish interview and Monday’s prison posts do not change that calendar. They place the due process argument, the loss figures, and the forfeiture question back into public view while the petition sits with the court.
The FTX collapse continues to shape United States crypto policy well beyond the courtroom. In August, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal derivatives regulator, imposed trading bans on former FTX executives Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, both of whom cooperated with the prosecution.
Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming has separately argued that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, known as the CLARITY Act, a market structure bill under consideration in Congress, would help protect users from future exchange failures like the one that took down FTX.
Also Read: US Judge Seizes One Crypto Wallet, Rejects 7 Others Over Forfeiture Notice