Lawyers tell CoinDesk the tactic could be effective for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s defense, but it comes with risks.

News emerged today that Sam Bankman-Fried has settled on a legal strategy ahead of his criminal trial this October, and it amounts to this:

The lawyers made me do it.

“Sam Bankman-Fried intends to argue he was acting in ‘good faith’ in loaning funds to FTX and Alameda executives, in setting Signal messages to auto-delete and in setting up a set of North American entities because he was following the advice of lawyers, including law firm Fenwick & West,” Nikhilesh De, CoinDesk’s regulatory editor, wrote Thursday.

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De reports on a letter from SBF’s lawyers, published Wednesday, that details this so-called "advice of counsel" strategy. SBF is accused by federal prosecutors of “multiple schemes to defraud,” including wire, commodities and securities fraud, and he faces decades in prison if found guilty.

His emerging strategy defense is certainly clever in theory, and aligns with some of the other messaging that SBF has been making since the spectacular collapse of FTX last November. The 31-year-old fallen crypto king has been presenting himself as young and hapless, too callow to have orchestrated any great evil. As he tells it, he was simply out of his depth, a creature molded by older,...

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