The last we heard from cryptocurrency scam artist Sam Bankman-Fried was that he intended to stay put in the Bahamas and fight extradition to the United States where he would face a mountain of fraud charges. Or at least that’s what his attorneys were saying earlier in the week. But now, in a complete reversal, he has reportedly decided that he will not fight the extradition effort when he appears in court tomorrow. Assuming he’s extradited, prosecutors in the United States are unlikely to agree to let him go free on bail and he could be facing up to more than a century in jail if he’s convicted on all of the expected charges. So what changed his mind? (NY Post)

Disgraced cryptocurrency tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried has decided not to contest extradition from the Bahamas to the US where he is facing fraud charges.

The fallen 30-year-old FTX mogul was arrested Monday night after the Bahamian government received formal notification from the Justice Department that Bankman-Fried was charged with defrauding investors out of $1.8 billion.

He is expected to announce his decision when he appears in court on Monday, a source familiar with the case told Reuters.

If SBF shows up in an American court, he is expected to be placed in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center and hit with charges including wire fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations. And it looks as if the charges shouldn’t be all that difficult to win convictions.

So why would he willingly come back to face the music? One current theory suggests that he’s probably not very comfortable in Fox Hill Prison in the Bahamas. The institution is reportedly overrun with rats and maggots. Even one of the wardens from Fox Hill has described the penitentiary as being “unfit for human habitation.”

Of course, if SBF spends the next year locked up at Rikers Island he probably won’t enjoy it much more than Fox Hill. Rikers is notoriously known as a “violent and dysfunctional” prison where 19 inmates have died in just the past year.

Prosecutors in Manhattan have already said that they will argue against allowing SBF to be freed on bail for the same reason that he was denied bail in the Bahamas twice this week. He’s an obvious flight risk. He may have lost roughly a billion dollars in the past couple of months, but he still reportedly has access to at least $100,000. You can probably run quite far out of the country with that kind of money. And SBF obviously wasn’t living in a Bahamas hotel by happenstance. He was almost certainly smart enough to realize that he needed to keep his distance from American law enforcement officials while pulling the various financial schemes he was attempting.

Manhattan prosecutor Damian Williams recently described the collapse of FTX as “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” That sounds pretty accurate to me. SBF probably assumed that the tens of millions of dollars he donated to Democrats would keep him out of jail. And for a fair number of weeks, that turned out to be an accurate assumption.

But the shame eventually grew to be too much even for his political benefactors. Now it appears that the other shoe is about to drop on the scam artist in a big way. The other big question on the table is still whether any of those Democrats plan to give the money back. Thus far, all we’ve heard is the sound of crickets.