Unless you have been sleeping through the last several months you know that crypto assets have been pummeled. Among them is the woeful FTX Trading Ltd. and its founder, Sam Bankman Fried, also known as SBF. Since the collapse many have attempted to conduct a post-mortem of what went wrong. At Deception And Truth Analysis (DATA) we can assess almost any document or multiple statements for their level of deception or truth. SBF sought to ameliorate concerns about FTX and about himself in a New York Times interview on 30 November with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Here is our analysis of that interview.
Background of FTX Meltdown
FTX ran the third largest cryptocurrency exchange, as well as a hedge fund. Things began to unravel on 11 November 2022 following a research note by CoinDesk in which they pointed out that a FTX partner firm, Alameda Research, had as its principal asset FTX’s native token, FTT. This, in turn led to the equivalent of a bank run on FTX. SBF also provided testimony to the US Congress in December 2022 and was arrested in the Bahamas on 12 December 2022. In next week’s article we will assess his Congressional testimony.
Deception And Truth Analysis´Assessment of SBF’s New York Times Interview
In order to more accurately assess SBF’s New York Times interview we have excised both the questions and the comments made by the interviewer, Andrew Ross Sorkin. This leaves 8,044 words for DATA to assess. At Deception And Truth Analysis we assess more than 30 different behavioral cues known by deception science as indicative of someone obfuscating, deceiving, and lying.
Our aggregate DATA Score for SBF’s interview is -6.13%; with our scores ranging between -100% and 100% and any negative score indicating a level of deceptiveness, and any positive score indicating truthfulness. So, in the aggregate SBF’s interview is deceptive. Given that the average DATA Score is 2.57% and our standard deviation of 13.42% almost one standard deviation below the mean. In other words about 65% of documents are more truthful than SBF’s interview.
But wait, there’s more! While the overall DATA Score for SBF’s interview is just -6.13% each of the eight fragments of the interview scores as deceptive. In other words, the entire interview is deceptive, though nothing is a screaming bald-faced lie.
Summary
Deception And Truth Analysis can assess almost and document for its veracity at with a double-blind, scientifically tested accuracy of 88.4%, and a rate of 400 pages per second. In other words, had investors used DATA to evaluate the statements of SBF sooner they likely would have uncovered that he is consistently deceptive in his statements. But more on this next week. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not tell you that our product myDATA is now available. myDATA allows our Clients to upload almost any document of their choosing to have it scored for its level of deceptiveness or truthfulness; just as we show above.
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