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Government Prosecutors Beg Judge to Ban Sam Bankman-Fried from Messaging With Signal

His use of the encrypted messaging app must be curtailed to avoid witness tampering and obstruction of justice, they argue.

Prosecutors are asking the judge overseeing the fraud case against Sam Bankman-Fried to amend the conditions of his bail after the FTX founder allegedly contacted the general counsel of the crypto trading platform via the encrypted messaging app Signal. “I would really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other,” Bankman-Fried wrote, according to prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. As the general counsel may be a witness at an eventual trial, prosecutors argued that this message is “suggestive” of witness tampering. They said that Bankman-Fried’s use of the autodelete feature on both Signal and Slack have impeded the government’s investigation, and restricting his use of Signal “and other encrypted and ephemeral call and messaging applications, is also necessary to prevent obstruction of justice.”