Convicted crypto crook Sam Bankman-Fried rejected a flirty inmate who tried to woo him with bikini photos during his stint at a federal jail in Brooklyn.
Bankman-Fried, 34, caused an uproar among his fellow detainees at the Metropolitan Detention Center by turning down the advances of a female inmate who bombarded him with letters and tried to hit on him by sending “chess moves his way,” according to New York Magazine profile.
The former crypto mogul — who was in the protective custody unit called “4 North” at the infamously abysmal jail between August 2023 and March 2025 — wrote back to the woman that he was not interested, the outlet reported.
Bankman-Fried’s rebuff stunned the fratty crew of inmates, but he was initially confused as to why they took it so personally.
“At that point, I saw true fear strike the heart of a group of very large, very intimidating grown men. Guns, needles, prison, knives — those were the reality of their day-to-day lives,” Bankman-Fried told the outlet.
“But the threat of a rare bikini picture in a sea of men being taken back from them was horrible,” he said.
Inmates at MDC are allowed to access a 20-by-20-foot recreational area off the unit, where they can shout at their prison girlfriends through grates to the female side of the lockup.
“The deck is all indoors, and there’s kind of, like, a small iron grate on the bottom of it,” Carmine Simpson, an ex-NYPD cop who solicited X-rated photos from minors and was housed at MDC, told the outlet.
“And if you lay down and look, you could see the top of the female grate, and guys would lay there for hours screaming down and trying to talk to their prison girlfriends,” Simpson said. “I mean, it’s so insane. People were having fistfights because they were trying to claim, like, ‘slots.’”
Though Bankman-Fried didn’t have a girlfriend when he was sent the flirty bikini pics, he had an on-again, off-again relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, who headed his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, before testifying against him.
Ellison was sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the sprawling multibillion-dollar fraud that brought down Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.
She was transferred last year from the low-security Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut to community confinement after serving about 11 months of her sentence.
Bankman-Fried was sentenced in March 2024 after a jury convicted him of orchestrating a massive fraud tied to the collapse of FTX, once one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.
He is currently behind bars at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, after being sentenced to 25 years for fraud and conspiracy.
The fraudster, who was once one of the Democratic Party’s biggest financial backers, is seeking a pardon from President Trump.