Former FTX executive Ryan Salame has a new LinkedIn job title.
Salame fooled his social media followers Thursday after District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied a request to delay the start of his incarceration until December.
The former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets reported to prison on Friday, but not before posting on LinkedIn that he “would like to share” that he was starting a new position as an “inmate at FCI Cumberland.” Salame even added “cleaning” and “reducing” to his LinkedIn skills, and he went to X to mourn his soon-to-break Wordle series.
Salame’s LinkedIn profile has since been deleted, but images of his updates have been circulating on social media platform X.
The former executive pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions and to defraud the Federal Election Commission, as well as conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmission business.
In May, Kaplan sentenced Salame to 7.5 years behind bars, but a furor over charges against the mother of his child, Michelle Bond, complicated the start of his prison sentence.
In a petition to the court in August, Salame claimed he made a deal with the government and pleaded guilty to avoid further investigation into Bond, a former congressional candidate.
A few days later, Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced charges against Bond for alleged campaign finance violations related to her failed 2022 run for Congress.
Williams said in a criminal complaint that Salame orchestrated a $400,000 sham payment to Bond from FTX, which Bond allegedly used to finance her campaign.
Salame’s lawyers alleged that the government used the former CEO’s negotiations to threaten Bond and get Salame to plead guilty. Salame first asked the court to dismiss Bond’s charges, but if that didn’t happen, to dismiss his own conviction and guilty plea.
However, the prosecutor shot back, calling Salame’s accusation “demonstrably false” in a response.
Salame’s attorneys later filed a motion to withdraw the former FTX executive’s petition so Bond could raise the issue in her case. However, Judge Kaplan subsequently accused the embattled former FTX executive of giving false testimony during his guilty plea in 2023.
“You’re asking me to uphold a conviction and sentence that I now know is based on false testimony before me in the plea bargain… And that could be a big problem.”
FTX imploded and filed for bankruptcy in November 2022 amid allegations that CEO Sam Bankman-Fried mishandled the exchange’s funds by lending billions of dollars in customer deposits to Alameda Research, the company’s trading arm.
The multi-billion dollar stock market collapse led to a sharp drop in crypto prices, and US federal authorities arrested Bankman-Fried the following month.
In March, Judge Kaplan sentenced Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison and three years of supervised release. He also ordered the 32-year-old to pay an $11 billion forfeiture. Bankman-Fried is appealing his conviction and sentence.
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