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In November, the news broke that FTX, the crypto exchange built by Sam Bankman-Fried, was collapsing — a month after Bankman-Fried flew with Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, to the Middle East to raise capital for FTX.
“I got it wrong,” Scaramucci told NBC News' Chuck Todd and “Meet the Press Reports” about his experience with Sam Bankman-Fried.
In December, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and charged with fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations.
He pleaded not guilty in January.
"What happened to Sam, unfortunately, and I don't know exactly when the nefariousness kicked in, he made a decision that he was going to use his clients' money as a piggy bank for his personal trading. And that is a cardinal sin of fraud. It’s the cardinal sin of Wall Street," Scaramucci said.
Scaramucci told Todd that even as the company was collapsing, he didn't realize that Bankman-Fried had intentionally perpetrated fraud.
"When the scandal started to erupt, I had made the assumption, based on our due diligence, he had the capital to meet the liquidity requirements," Scaramucci told Todd.
"It didn't dawn on me until Tuesday morning ... I had booked myself on a JetBlue flight to the Bahamas, to meet with him to square up with him, face to face. And it was there in that moment that I realized, okay, he broke the code of conduct ... and he's probably going to go to jail for a very long time," Scaramucci added.
Scaramucci also mentioned that Bankman-Fried isn't the only grifter he's interacted with before. In 2017, Scaramucci served as former President Donald Trump's Communications Director at the White House.
"[Trump is] a different type of grifter than Sam Bankman-Fried, but yes, he's a grifter," he said.
Scaramucci added, "They have the same chemistry, these types of people. They objectify human beings. They don't look at you or me as flesh and blood and develop empathy for us. They see us as either means to get them to a place that they need to get to, and therefore then they can immediately discard you, or they'll run over you."
For more from Chuck Todd's interview with Anthony Scaramucci and for more about grifters and scammers, tune into this week's episode of "Meet the Press Reports" on NBC News Now and Peacock.
