At first glance, Sam Bankman-Fried bears little resemblance to Bernie Madoff. One is a smartly-suited, grey-haired financial titan with a 40-year career on Wall Street, and the other a 30-year-old millennial king of crypto in shorts and T-shirt.
But almost 14 years to the day since Madoff was arrested and charged with fraud in New York for orchestrating a long-running pyramid scheme, the FTX crypto scandal is being compared to Madoff’s criminal enterprise.